136: How SDRs Can Hit 225% of Quota With Armand Farrokh

Thank you to our sponsors, LeadIQ, Costello, SalesLoft, WorkRamp, and Dialpad for helping us produce this podcast. Head over to jbarrows.com slash blog for the highlights of this episode and explore resources you can use right away. Let's make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows. Make it happen Monday. So I'm here with somebody who is seems to be almost as busy as I am these days. And we're going to have a conversation about time management and how to get a bunch of shit done while we are going crazy. So Armand, the Director of Sales over at Cardo, you want to tell everybody hello and where you're coming from? Hey, guys. How are we doing? John, thank you so much for having me on board.

Yeah. So Armand, talk to me about where... Give us a little bit of background because I think this is going to put some context to this conversation right now. And leading up to actually what you're doing literally right now in the dual role that you're doing right now. Definitely. So by background, 60 seconds on me. I sold insurance for two years. I ran a startup for two years. I worked in strategy and venture investments for two years. And then I came to Card. Card is a company that helps private companies manage their equity. So you can buy a stock of Walmart extremely easy. It's almost impossible to do that on the private side. And so I started as an account executive. I did about 225% of my number in my last quarter and became the number one 80 out of 40.

And it was largely because I was an extremely strong prospector. It was a solid closer, but the number one thing is I had more pipe than anybody else. And so they said, hey, take what you're doing, multiply it across 30 SDRs. Took over a team of 15 SDRs at the time and one manager and doubled the team size. So from 15 to 30, but quintupled pipeline generation across the team. So from X million to XX millions. And then they said, hey, take what you're doing. SMBAEs don't have any SDR support and go and expand your org. And so today I run both SDR and SMBAEs. It's in a work of about 50 SDRs and SMBAEs as well as seven managers. So it's a lot. I mean, what you're dealing with right now, because, you know, it's funny.

I ask a lot of reps, you know, one of the big things for me that reps, when I say, oh, what do you want to get out of today's training or whatever it is? They always, you know, always time management comes up. And I always call bullshit on reps. I'm like, why is time management a problem? Right? Because they say, well, I'm too busy. I got too many things that they're asking me to do. And I literally say, bullshit, like, fuck off. That is not true. It is just that you're very inefficient with what you do. And I put that on myself, too. You know what I mean? Like, it's not that I don't have enough hours in the day. It's literally that I waste some of the hours in the day by doing dumb shit or I'm not focused on things.

So what did you, when you took that team from, when you doubled that team and you, but you tripled the output of that team, like, what do you think the main, before and after were that you brought to that, that you brought with your skill set to that team to make it more efficient? Like, what's the biggest challenge you see that reps have with efficiencies when it comes to doing, I mean, really, at the end of the day, when it's just prospecting, right? You could sit there and say, well, what the fuck? You just got to make phone calls and do a little bit of research. Like, why is it so busy? So what are some of the things that you get in the way of reps and what is the biggest reason why they get in their own way?

100%. I mean, you have the famous quote, everybody is, has a game plan until they get punched in the face. And I 100% agree with that. And what that means for most sales reps or AEs or SDRs or whatever it might be is you have a wide open week. And so you plan to make $200, $300, $400, whatever it is, whatever your metrics are. And then you get two, three discovery calls thrown on your calendar. And then you've got to send two or three follow-ups. And then you've got to do this and that. You've got to reply to your inbox. And then your boss blows you up with forecasts. And all of a sudden, everybody says, you know, I'm just managing so many deals that I don't have the time to prospect. And for me, it was, look, I have a finite number of hours in the day.

But what I can absolutely control is the transition lag between every single thing that I do. And so what most reps would do is they would take a sales call and they would leave a little bit of buffer time to send a follow-up email. And then they would go on the next sales call and they would send another one. And I actually did the exact opposite thing where I tried to remove decision fatigue. And I took notes in form of my recap email template. And then I lined up my calls back to back to back to back to back to back to back. And if any single day got too ugly, I would block two hours minimum for prospecting only. And then at 4 p.m. at the end of the day, outside of the golden hours, every single follow-up email would go out.

Because they're not thinking about me through the whole day. They have calendars that look like yours. And they're doing the rest of their job throughout the day. And at the end of the day, they're checking their inbox. And that's the mentality behind it is bucket all the nonsense together and get momentum behind it. And I think that's... I couldn't agree. Like, it's funny. You and I do the exact same thing. So for me, because I use Chili Piper for my meetings, right? So I'll send you a link to my calendar and I'll say, okay, just pick a time. And I don't really pay much attention, right? So all of a sudden, prep for my day tomorrow. I'll look at my day tomorrow. Well, whatever. Like Monday or Tuesday or something like that the night before.

And I'll be like, oh, my God. You know, it's literally back to back to back to back to back. Like every half hour. And so I do not have time to do the prep and the follow-up, right? So I do the exact same thing. I go through my checklist the night before of all those meetings to prep for them, to get my, you know, who am I talking to? What's my goal for that meeting? That type of stuff. I have a very structured way that I take my notes. I take them in a format that I can legit just cut and paste and put into an email for the follow-up to say, cool. And then at the end of the day, that's when I'm doing all my follow-up, right? So because I'm getting very efficient at it. Have you done... Let me ask you.

How did you come to this point? Did you read anything about it? Or was it almost like a forcing function for you to be efficient? Or have you always been very efficient with how you've approached things? No. So I used to be fat kid, extremely disorganized, extremely introverted. Not a lot has changed. Just a little bit less introverted. And so basically what happened is there was a point back all the way back in college where I wanted to start a company. And I was on the college wrestling team. I was managing a full-time course schedule. I was working two jobs. And now I wanted to start a company. And I was doing every single one of those things extremely poorly. And so I just got in the habit of saying, I'm going to try to spend maybe an hour every single night planning my attack for the next day.

And then I'm going to spend the entire remaining eight hours of the beginning of tomorrow to the end of the day tunnel visioning like crazy. And it's a practice because inevitably you don't actually keep the time off to the beginning. Of course. Yeah, there's always the, ah, sorry, I got to, you know, that came up. And there are certain things. But how do you keep yourself focused, right? Because are you like from a plan standpoint, do you, how far do you look out for your goals to back into them? Right. And so are you saying, how far do we look out at the goals or at the schedule itself? I'm talking about you personally, like with, with, cause, cause the way I look at it is I got a big hairy goal that I want to get to.

Right. So, you know, and I'm going to back into that and then I'm saying, okay, well, based on that goal, um, here's the kind of the buckets that I need to address. And then based on those buckets, here's the activities that I need to do on a daily basis to get there. My question for you is personally, like in your life, right? Do you look five years out? Do you look 10 years out? Do you look a year out and back into it? Cause I, cause I think there's personal and professional goals. And I think ultimately the personal goals are the ones that, that drive us in the professional goals are the ones that get us to that personal goal. So help me understand you just, cause I just want to understand how you take a little bit.

Yeah. So I, it's new year's it's, it's not new year's resolution season. It's new year's resolutions. Giving up on season. Yeah, exactly. And so I actually hate new year's resolutions because they tend to be this big lofty goal. Yep. And then it just tends to be let's live now. And so I, I'm a huge fan of, I mean, my, one of my goals was making director. And so I've got to that a little bit earlier than, than other things, but I have a ton of other goals. Everyone on the team wants to make president's club, but if you don't back that out into quarter month, week, day activities, literally down to level where it's in a spreadsheet and then create systems to hold you accountable. Meaning time blocks on your calendar every single week to listen to a podcast, to dial, to do X, Y, or Z.

For me, one of my things was expanding my network. I mandate that I sign up for one networking event every single month. And I have reminders and calendar blocks set up and I have self punishment set up where I'll literally give someone random a hundred dollar bill if I don't do it. No way. Really? If you don't set up accountability systems for yourself on a month, week, day, quarter basis, you're not going to do it. No. And because that comes down to routine, right? I've been, I've been really talking about this a lot, which is, you know, if you don't have a routine doing something, it rarely happens. It's like working out, right? Like if you get into a routine of every morning you get up and you, you know, you go to the gym, you hit a few, you know, or, or you don't even need to go to the gym.

Like you just do a few pushup sit-ups and you hit the elliptical for like 15 minutes, but you do that every day. You stay in shape, right? But if you like, but for me, like I'm an event driven worker outer, right? Like I suck at working out because I like, I work out for like one thing, like we're going on vacation. So fuck it. I got to go to the gym for the next two months. So I don't look like a blob on the beach. Right. But I know if I just woke up every morning, did a little bit. So what's your routine? I know you kind of broke down your week, but what's your routine look like? Yeah. So it starts in the morning and I've amalgamated a series of morning routines from people that, that have mentored me over time.

And so the first thing that I do is I don't hit the snooze button. And some of this comes from the book, the miracle morning is the, the, the moment you hit snooze, you're basically saying, I'm willingly going to repeat the worst part of the day over and over and over again. And that is easily the worst part of the day. That stuff comes from the book, the miracle morning, phenomenal book. But then after that, I get up, I wash my face, blah, blah, blah. I immediately make my bed and sit down on the bed and I start to have me time. And so I want to start the day on my terms, not on someone else's terms. And so what I do is I pick up the book or I listen to a podcast or sometimes I just sit there and I start writing and I'm going to spend the first 10, 15, 20 minutes a day focused on getting myself better before I have a boss breathing down my neck, before I have a kid crying, before I have a girlfriend going crazy, whatever it might be.

And I'm going to get that quiet then while I'm doing that, I'm drinking pre-workout on the side. And the moment I get too tingly, that's when I get up and I go to the gym. And so I've started my day two days before, but I feel like a million bucks going in. And I promise you, once it hits 7 p.m., I'm still going strong, whereas other people are either skipping their evening workout or they're eating crap dinner or they're going out for drinks. And I still feel like a million bucks. Yeah, I mean, I think that routine and having it be consistent. Now, do you break your weeks down where you do certain things in certain times, like certain days of the month or days of the week? In terms of sales or just in general?

Let's now get a little bit more towards our jobs, right? Like from a sales standpoint, Mondays versus Tuesdays, mornings versus afternoons, do you get that detailed? A hundred percent. And so there are certain things that are the first dichotomy in your calendar should be your golden hours versus your everything else, of course. And so those golden hours for me, that's 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. What do you define as a golden hour? Golden hour, it means I'm doing absolutely nothing but being in front of customers or trying to get in front of customers. Okay. Those are the only two things I'm allowed to do. Okay. And so it's either taking discovery calls, it's writing cold emails, it's making cold calls, and it's getting in front of people.

Okay. Everything after that comes from the hours of 3 to 7 p.m. and beyond, where it's follow-up emails, it's researching accounts, it's finding accounts. All of that stuff comes after hours. So I'm going to, so this is a little bit of a divergence because I'm curious on this. One of my frustrations is these days when I do training, right? So I don't, I'm debating in my, I'm asking this question to a lot of people. Can you, and I'm going to ask you this question, but I'm going to give you what I'm getting at here, which is, can you teach work ethic? Can you teach drive? What do you think on that one? So when I, when I originally took it, taken over the team at, at Carta, there were, I mean, we, you name it, we had it.

It was the work ethic. It was the way too many sales floors clear out at 5 p.m. issue. It was morale. It was everything. I don't believe you can teach that, but you can absolutely build a culture that fosters it. And so the way you find it is you hire for the right types of people. And the first thing you got to do is you got to rally around the, around the core. And the number one thing that I hire for is the chip on the shoulder, right? Not an attitude issue. Yeah. Got a little bit of something to prove. How do you find that out? There are, I mean, we could have a whole session about interview questions, but I've been through a number of sales interviews. And one of my philosophies on sales interviews is that they should be extremely difficult.

Because you need to see how people react to diversity. And so one of my favorite things to do is, for example, I want to get a sense of how an SDR is going to prospect. And so I'll say, hey, there are 40,000 venture-backed companies out there. And on any given day, you got to get down to 50. I'm going to give you an infinite database of publicly available information. I want you to start giving me filters that help you narrow down to what our ideal customer might be and who you're going to run a cadence or sequence or campaign is. And so inevitably, they'll keep giving me filtering criteria. And I'll just keep going until they run out. And I ask them to get resourceful. Then you get a sense of how they start asking questions and how they do when they're under pressure.

If they start sitting back in the chair, if they get nervous, they're twiddling their thumbs. And that's how you can start to see how someone acts under pressure. We do the same thing with a cold call test where it's never an easy cold call. But the people who demonstrate the grit and the coachability throughout the call are the ones that come through. I used to do that, too. So I would go through the interview and I would ask good questions and I'd push them a little bit. But there's always the professional interviewers. You know what I mean? There's always the kid that has read all the books on interviewing and knows the questions, no matter how good we are at asking them. But then I used to put them through this cold calling exercise where I would say, all right, whatever, like, tell me what you sold.

Well, like, what did you sell recently? Even if it was just something that whatever you're passionate about, right? Like, now, I'm going to be your exact target market for that thing. Go in the other room, cold call me, and all you got to do is get a meeting, right? So I would let them go do that. And whether they're good or bad, it didn't matter. Because when they came back, I would give them feedback. Well, this is what you did good. This is what you did bad. I think you didn't do this. Now, you got to go back into the other room, cold call me again. But now you're selling my product. Now you're selling, you know, at the back of the day, it was outsourced IT services, right? So now you're a rep here at this company, and I am a target market for you, and you need to now cold call me.

And again, you're not pitching anything. You're just trying to get me a meeting. And the people that took the coaching were the ones that I said, okay, right? Versus the ones who either just didn't take the coaching or tried the exact same approach or just didn't even listen to what I said. Those are the ones I was like, I don't give a shit how good that interview was. If you're not coachable, I don't care. Exactly. And what's hilarious is we do something very similar where we whiteboard out feedback, and we watch the candidates very closely to get a sense of how they react. And inevitably, a lot of them will know to be coachable in the interview. But again, if you do the exact same thing again, I actually prefer if it's worse the second time.

Right. Because you tried something. You're trying something new. And almost, it's very, very rarely better the second time. It's almost never better the second time. Yeah. But I appreciate that they're trying something new and they're trying to get reps in. Yeah. So, so what do you do? So, like, because I think, I think you're spot on, right? Like you build that culture. But you got some, say you got some kids on the team that are just like, just the, you know, go home at five kids. I mean, I guess there's always room for B players in every organization, right? So, but, but they do take away from the A players, right? From the people who do have the work. Do you, do you think they just ultimately flush themselves out?

Or from a management standpoint, do you have to purposely put them in different buckets and almost coach them in a totally different way to get, to get them to do kind of find that, that, that gear, if you will? Yeah. So, so the, the, the problem is John, exactly what you just defined is they're comfortable. They're, they're B players. And so because people in that bucket tend to be comfortable, they don't tend to self-select out. Right. And so you've got to parse that out in the hiring process, but you can't always do it. And so you've got to over index on rallying around the core and setting the expectations. And this is a little bit of a controversial opinion of mine, but I do happen to believe in, up or out because I don't want somebody to be an STR for seven years.

I want people who want to be CRO. I want people who want to go start their own companies. I want people who literally come to the interview and say, I want to take your job. And I will literally sit right next to you through midnight. If that's what you want to work on and I'll buy you dinner and I'll be right there with you. How do you balance that though, with the lack of patience? Cause I, I, I love that drive too. You know, I was that kid. I was, uh, I remember when I was working at Xerox, right? Um, it was my second job. My first job was DeWalt and my second job was Xerox. And you know, I was just a sales rep, right? So what I would do is, and I just, and I, for whatever reason I had a strong work ethic, right?

And so I would just, I just did what I thought my job was, but I was getting so many accolades because my manners were like, oh man, you're kicking ass. Like you're great. And so I'm like, okay, well look, here's the deal. Like, here's my job. Okay. Here's the next job that here's the next job in my role. Here's the next job. Like I want that job. Like how fast can I get there? Right. And, and, and that's the reason I left Xerox was because the answer was, well, you have to spend two years doing this, then two years doing that, then two years doing this. And I just didn't, I was like, wait a minute. So that kid over there who sucks is going to get the same opportunity for a job as, you know, as a promotion as I am.

Um, so that's why I kind of like the startup world, but, but my mentality was like, I want to get there, but I'm going to master this. I'm going to master this. And it's, I kind of go back, like my first major in college was, was art. And one of my favorite artists is Picasso and Picasso. What he did was he mastered every medium before he went to the next one. Right. So he went all in on acrylics, all in on this, but he, and he mastered it. Before he went to that next level. I fear these days that we're in such a short term results oriented society and, and, and an impatience is there to get to that next level without earning the right to get to that next level. So how do you balance that as I'm, especially as a manager and guiding these kids towards that?

Exactly. And I, and I, I feel this every day, week, month, because I mean, I'm managing people fresh out of college and there's always this perception of what your career is going to look like and all of that. And then you're making 200 gold calls. And so it's a tough job. And so let's just acknowledge that, that SDR is not an easy job. Neither is AE or anything in sales. If you want to be number one. And so one thing that you mentioned, John is, is the immediate red flag of a manager is you were getting all these accolades. You're saying, Hey, you kick ass. You're the best in the world. You're doing all the right things. And people don't get impatient with timeline. People get impatient when they think they've got it all figured out and their manager doesn't have a good enough answer to challenge them.

And so when I've got an SDR, who's been in seat for six months or nine months or 12 months and they're knocking the cover off the ball, off the ball, that's when I'm turning up the heat. Now, go ahead. No, cause I, cause I think you said something important there though. You said they think they have it figured out. There's a big difference between thinking they have it figured out and actually having it figured out. Like, I'll give you like my daughter is a perfect example. She's nine years old. Right. So she doesn't really understand hard work or anything like that, but like, she'll do something and she'll like, she'll do it. Like, like easy example, like basketball. Right. So I'm like, okay, Hey, like start playing basketball a few years back.

Right. And we got, we, you know, raised the hoop from six feet to 10 feet. Right. And she's starting to shoot at the 10 foot level. So she can get the ball up there and she's, Oh, I got this. I'm like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. You got this. Like just because you could get the ball 10 feet in the air and it goes in every once in a while does not mean you figured out basketball. Right. So, so how do you balance that, that kid who thinks they have it figured out? Cause I like, this is a real thing, man. Like there's these kids who like have this perception of, yeah, I got this. When you and I both know, based on the fucking hurt locker that we've been through in our careers that no, you don't, you're nowhere, you're nowhere near where you need to be.

Right. And so how do you break that mentality? I mean, I know this is a coaching thing and all that other stuff, but I think there's a, there's an ego thing there too. Right. Yeah. And again, a lot of it is just, if you can't set a precedent and sometimes, unfortunately, when you're stepping into a new role, you're inheriting a precedent with timeline or whatever it might be. And the worst thing that can kill a culture is promoting people who don't deserve it or promoting people early who aren't as good as the new guy on the block. And so there's gotta be a minimum level of standard, but to your point, the moment they think they've got to figure it out, I raised the bar just a little bit. Okay.

And so not, I raised the bar in terms of promotion timeline or anything, but now I say, Hey, you're good now, now let's do a mock discovery and I'm going to play the toughest CFO in the world and let's see how you do. All right. Now you're an SDR. You want to go and close. I'm going to put you on a call and I'm going to have you drive in a situation where you might not be familiar. And let's see how, if you can really tango and you can dance the dance and John, if they keep passing all the challenges, then tenure goes out the window. And if you're kicking ass and you're going to be 10 times better than the guy next to you, then I'll move you. There's a degree of time and seat in anything. No one gets promoted to enterprise in one month, right?

It just doesn't happen, but you can be flexible if somebody keeps rising to the occasion, but you can't be an incompetent manager and not constantly challenge them. Yeah. And I think that like, I kind of inherently did that. And I think for me, it was like a, it was almost like a necessary evil. Cause I was a player coach, right? When I was a VP, I had, I had six reps reporting to me and I just didn't have the time to develop reps. Like I wanted to, you know, sit with them and everything else. So I used to give them assignments and part of it was because I needed to delegate and take shit off of my plate. But the other part was to, to your point, to see how they would react and to see if they would take on that additional responsibility, a without bitching about it, and then B, what did they do with that additional responsibility and how do they execute on it?

And if they kept executing the world was theirs. Like I, I, I put in guidelines as far as, okay, for the first year you have to spend it, you know, being a inside sales rep basically. And then after a year, based on your results, then we'll promote you to this. But if six months in you were murdering it and then I started giving you extra responsibilities and two months after that, you would, you know, you're murdering those like kid. All right, go fucking, you know, get out into the field cause you're murdered, you know? So how, um, let's now talk about like the, cause I think this is, you know, the motivation piece is, is critical. I, I, I think you can't, I think you put people in position to be successful, but the whole can't, you know, force a horse to drink, you know, type of thing you bring them.

Um, let's talk now though, about like the, the, how you actually find the time to carve off all the stuff that isn't important, because I think that's like, people get bogged down with shit that's just straight up, not important. They think it is. And so it's kind of that 80, 20 line, right? How do you, how do you figure out what's actually important to working on and when, when what's not on a day-to-day basis? Definitely. And so I like breaking down your day into the core activities and you've probably heard there's the urgency and importance quadrant. And so people tend to spend time on what's urgent and you've got to make sure that you leave some time for the stuff that's not necessarily urgent, but extremely important.

Whether that's watching tapes, listening to podcasts, reading books, whatever it might be. Coaching as a manager. Coaching as a manager. Right. All the little things that aren't putting out fires. You've got to block time for that on your calendar. But then you also have to block time for all the stuff that's just the core piece of the job. And so I broke it into three different pieces as an accounting executive. I got a prospect. And so the way I consider prospecting is it's not like just the cold calling and the emailing. It's finding the accounts. And so broke that into, I got to find the accounts. I got to find the people on the accounts. I got a cold call. I got a cold email. And that's what I started to stretch across my calendar.

So I said, I got to do cold calls every single day because there's a, I am the bottleneck there. But then across Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I got to break up the tasks of prospecting in the five different days. And so what I always like to say is I can beat Usain Bolt in a 50 meter dash. The way I'm going to do it is I'm going to make him run in 10, five meter tubes and go in zigzags. And I'm going to run the 50 meter dash. And so on Monday, Usain Bolt is finding one account. He's finding a CFO, a controller, a head of finance on that account. He's going to try to tailor emails for that account now. And then he's going to try to make a call on that account. Meanwhile, on Monday, I'm pulling up my list at 4 p.m.

outside of the golden hours. And at 4 p.m., I'm finding 20 to 25 accounts back to back, back, back, back, back, back. Tuesday, I'm finding the contacts. Wednesday, I'm teeing up the sequences and I'm just getting an email writing mode. And all my mind is doing is it's writing emails. I got the same tabs open. Thursday, I'm cleaning out all the junk or reworking it at a different angle. And then Friday, I'm doing deep, deep, deep ABM style account teardowns. We're actually sending people cakes and cookies and all that good stuff. So, I mean, to me, it just screams like structure, organization, focus, right? I mean, time management, to me, momentum and focus are two underrated things in the sense that by focusing for a period of time, I think there's something about this.

I forget the book, but it's like there's some, you probably know it better than I do. But if you have momentum doing something, right, where you have that groove and you stop for any reason, I think it's the stats say it takes something like eight to 10 minutes just to get back to where you were, right? So if you're cold calling, going back to your example of like you're cold calling and somebody gets a meeting and then they stop and they send information, they go grab coffee. Like you just murdered your momentum with cold calling. So it's like, for me, I'm just cold calling during that hour. I'm not sending information. I'm not doing research. I'm not getting my, I do a, I usually do a one hour prep for a one hour call blitz during that hour.

I'm looking at my numbers. I'm getting my names, you know, that type of stuff. So during that call blitz, I'm just hammering the phones, right? I'm not right. Cause like I'll run call blitzes sometimes and I'll see kids and they'll like spend five minutes looking for a phone number, then go on the website, then do this and then make a phone. And like literally the four calls, the hour goes by and they've made four calls. It's like, that was fucking meaningless. Um, which actually picks me cause you, you had to put something in the notes on this one. Uh, one in four people book a meeting with like, let's talk about this one, man. You talk about booking a meeting with one in four people, like having a 25% conversion ratio when somebody picks up that phone.

Correct. So there's a call to contact, which is a little bit tougher to control. You got to get good phone numbers. You got to call the right people. And that tends to be, it tends to float around 10 to 20% for us. Right. And so it's getting more and more flooded. But when I do get somebody on the phone, so of that 10 to 20%, one in four, I can book a call. And so talk to me about that. Yeah. I used to suck on the phones, John. I sold insurance and I was 18 years old at the time. And I would be calling on partners, the law firms, and they would, I, they could just mail me out. And so I, I break it down into a couple of different pieces. So the first piece is the tone and the mindset behind the call.

And I don't like to just talk mindset behind it. But I used to be in strategy and, and, and venture investments. And what we would do is in order to get a business to say, Hey, we're going to invest $50 million in this project. You would start with the managers and then you'd go to the directors and you'd present to the VPs, the SVPs, the EVPs, and then eventually the presidents or the CSS. And it was hilarious. It was almost comical. As you would go up in the chain of command, they would talk slower. And maybe because they just became older and older ass men, maybe, maybe that was the thing. Yeah. But inevitably what happens is I used to work for the 200,000 employee companies. There is no way that the CEO or the CFO or the president of the division will know what's going on at the ground level or have a good grasp of what you're telling them.

And so they can slow it way down and do real time processing with you. And so that's the same mindset on a cold call when you get an objection. And so the first thing is when someone slams you with, Hey, John, I'm not interested. The first, or I'm busy. I'm running into a meeting. Some people say, I'm in a meeting. Who does that? Right. And, and, and the first thing every junior rep tries to do is they try to speed up. They say, can I, can I just get 30 seconds to tell you what I'm calling you? Tell me it for a bit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you lose credibility. And so the first thing you've got to do is when you get a tough objection, slow it way down and last. And so John, if you say, Hey, I'm not interested.

John, shocker that when I picked up the phone, you're, you're, you're, you don't have a bunch of time open on your calendar. Could you give me a sense of why you're not interested? Are you working on Excel? Is it experience? How are you going to do this after that? It sounds like you heard our new talks around. And you just, the general tone behind it is, I assume you're going to take a meeting with me. And so I'm going to be surprised or laugh when you give me a tough objection. Okay. It's funny you say that. Cause I, I have always had the mentality that as long as you believe in what you do, right? And that's, I think a fundamental thing here with sales reps is you got to believe that, that what you do makes a difference.

It doesn't make a difference for everybody, but it makes a difference for the right client. Right. And if you have that belief, then you can have that mentality, right? Cause my mentality always, when I was cold calling and still to this day, when I make a few is I'm doing you a favor. And I'm, by the way, I'm doing you a favor one way or the other, because I'm doing you a favor because if you, if you aren't the right, if there's not a fit, then I go away. I take you off the list and you'll never hear from me again. If you, if you're genuinely not a fit for what we do. Right. But if you are a fit, then I got some awesome shit here, man, that'll make a difference. So let's just have this conversation.

And I think you're spot on. It's like there, there comes a level of maturity, I think of slowing down. And I mean, now at 44 years old, like I'm still, I still fucking go hard, man. Right. But at the end of the day, conversations are a lot more paced than they used to be. Right. But, but do you think that that's inherent in the role in the sense that like we're asking these kids to make $50 a day? So it's a short term thing, like go, go, go, go, go. And, and how do you, how do you coach, how do you coach something like that without experience? Yeah. I think a lot of it is just being able to point that out happening in real time on a sales call where you can point to a CFL and say, Hey, look how slow this guy's talking.

You got to slow it way down as somebody who talks super, super, super quickly. The second thing is with SDRs by just, I hate it when people say, Oh, sell the dream, sell the vision, talk slowly. That's not tangible. So I actually break the cold call down into four different parts. So it's, uh, what's your opener? Yeah. How do you value prop? Or how do you say your value prop or whatever you want to call it? How do you handle objections? And then how do you go in for the kid? And so it starts with the opener. And so a lot of people in their openers, what are the two most common openers? How's your day going? How's it doing? Yeah. How you doing today? Or is now a bad time? Those are the two most common ones.

I'm actually more okay with the first one than the second one, because it's never a good time. Never. It is never, ever a good time. And so what we start with is, uh, you start with an assumptive opener. And so I'm huge on leading with context. And so you've done your research, you've done your account teardowns and everybody else is going to pick up the phone saying, Hey, it's Armand at Carta insert, whatever opener. And I actually flipped that up on its head. And so my opener sounds something along the lines of, Hey, John, we work with a number of Andreessen portfolio companies. We're one ourself. It's Armand at Carta. Have you heard our name tossed around? And then you shut them. And so you lead with context because that gets them to sit up.

And so you can use that with, Hey, we work with your competitors. It's Armand at Carta. Have you heard our name tossed around? We work in your industry. We work with your lawyers. You raised a round. Congrats on that. It gets our attention. And then you say your name, which is much less important. And then you don't ask, how's it going? Or is it a bad time? You ask if you've heard the name tossed around because I'm in your network and I assume that you should know that I'm calling. Gotcha. Yeah, I like that. See, I, we, and there's a look there. So what you talked about there is like, there's a pattern interrupt factor, right? Like you're, you're, you're interrupting the pattern of what everybody else says.

Because even like, Hey, how you doing today? But also, Hey, this is John Barrels with Jay Barrels sales training, right? As soon as that comes out of my mouth, you're like, fuck sales call, get me off this phone. And you're literally not listening to what I'm saying to you right now. Like you are just waiting for me to take a breath. I mean, I could say, I got a bag of gold here for you. All you got to do is tell me hi. And you're still going to be like, yeah, whatever. Send me an information, right? So we do, we do a slightly different, we do the pattern interrupt where we're like, Hey, thanks for taking my call. Do you got a couple of minutes? And then shut up. And inevitably it's, well, not really, but who is this?

What do you want? Well, this is John with Jay Barrels sales training. And the reason for my call today, and I move right into it. So I don't, to your point, like your name is not important. So you say it because it's rude not to, but then you, but then you move right into the reason for your call. And the reason is we working with your competition. I was on your website, you know, whatever that is, but it gets right to that point. And that's where just that small, slight interruption of, Hey, thanks for taking my call. Do you got a couple of minutes that pauses them for a second is a little bit of a, all right, you know, let's now let's have an actual conversation. Exactly. And then that bleeds right into your value profit.

So you basically just pull the context a little bit forward and then you do the context and then value. And that's the same structure for phones and for emails, whatever it might be. It's context value apps. A lot of people will be like, well, Hey, it's, it's John at Jay Barrels consulting and we do X, X, X, X, Y, Z. And here are the seven bullets of all the things we do. And so instead say, Hey, I know this about you. And that's why I'm in business and I'm trying to call you. And that resonates 10 times more than some knockoff elevator pitch. What's this disarmingly blunt stuff you talk about? Yeah. So being disarmingly blunt. And so sometimes people will, one thing that throws off new reps all the time is they'll be like, where'd you get my phone number?

Or insert X, very surprising. Hey, is this a cold call or what are you trying to sell? And so when people say, is this a cold call? I say, yes, it's an extremely well-researched cold call. And so I'm not going to lie. Am I going to try to like trick them into saying that I'm selling them? I'm not going to do that. Where'd you get a number? I Googled your first and last name on the internet and your company and you're a pretty popular guy. I can actually show you, but, and I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling and then you can tell me if we're fit. Yeah. And so just pattern break, interrupt. Yeah. I do that too. Like somebody's like, um, where'd you get my, uh, I mean, I'll, I'll even, I'll straight up say the tool.

Like, where'd you get my number? Zoom info. I was like, oh, oh, like, what are you fucking stupid? Like, like where, you know what I mean? Like, or like, uh, it is this, I like this one. Is this a cold call? My answer to that one is, uh, depends on what your definition of cold is. All right. Or I like this one, uh, which is, is this a sales call? Like the nuances matter, right? Cause if somebody is like, is this a sales call? My answer is I have no idea. And they're like, excuse me, how do you know, not know there's a self call? I'm like, I don't know if you have something that my solution can solve, then sure. It becomes a sales call. But right now I have no idea whether you even need what I have.

So I just want 10 minutes of your time. So I could ask you a few quick questions and then, yeah, maybe it'll turn into a sales call if there's something we can work on together. And inevitably that is kind of like the, to your point, like the disarmingly blunt or like the, I'm not lying to you. Cause I'm not going to say, no, it's not a sales call. No, it's not a, you know, not a cold call. I'm going to say, I don't know. Depends. It's the same exact philosophy by behind. I mean, John, basically what you're saying is like, you're going to do that pattern interrupt and basically say, Hey, I don't know if this is a sales call. I'm not a horrible sales person is the one who sells before they need to sell or sells before they know context.

And so this is actually about you, right? I'm in your network. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions. The same thing goes when you get a really, really tough objection, instead of giving an answer, if somebody says I'm on this competitor, don't just start ribbing apart the competitor, especially if you're in a complex solution. If someone's on SAP and you're selling Oracle and they say I'm on SAP, you could literally go through 17 different white papers on how SAP is going. So you've got to ask questions first. Well, and also you can never call somebody's baby ugly. You know what I mean? Like whatever their existing solution is, be like, Oh, cool. How's that working out for you? You know what I mean?

Like I even go as basic as like, I still, to this day, after 23 years of selling, I still use the question. Okay, cool. On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you in this area of that? You know what I mean? Like that type of thing. Give me a number, right? If you're a 10, cool. Let's get off the phone right now. Like not even worth having this conversation. If you're a nine, maybe, maybe there's something for us to chat about. What's the biggest thing is people forget to push pull on a call. You can push away and say like, I'm sure you've got this stuff taken care of, right? They're, they're an awesome company. You know, my guess is this isn't an issue for you. Sometimes what we'll find is X can be a little bit challenging.

Is that the case for you? Are you guys good? Yeah. And then you can push away and it immediately starts to lower the guard. Do you disqualify more than you qualify? When I, the moment, so the beauty of the phones is you can get to your quick nose faster. So whatever it is about human psychology, there's something called an open rate on an email, as you know, and there's a 50 to 60 to 70% open rate if you're, if you're quite good. And then there's the reply rate, which is dramatically lower than the open rate. And so inevitably the remaining 50 people who did open the email, but did not reply to the email are inherently telling, you know, or they have objections that they don't actually want to give you.

And so if I get one, two, three objections that I know card is not going to be a fit for or whatever I'm selling, it's actually great because now I can take them out of my account list. It actually allows me to spend less time researching and writing emails to get a quick rejection. But when I smell the right type of objection that they weren't willing to give me on the email, that's when I come in hot. Do you, have you been through Sandler? Yes. Upfront contract. Yes, we've done it. Do you, do you use it? I don't use it. So they start with the, did I catch you at a bad time? I don't like that. I think that's terrible. Right? No, but I'm saying like, Hey, the, you know, the goal of this call is I'm going to ask you a few quick, you know, something like this on a cold call.

So usually my flow is, Hey, thanks for taking my call. Do you got a couple of minutes? Well, not really, but who is this? What do you want? Well, this is John with Jay Barrow sales. And the reason for my call today is, and I just want to see if I can get 10 minutes on your time. Right. And then they'll say, sometimes they'll say, well, look, you caught me now. What do you want? And I'll be like, look, I know you weren't expecting my call. So I'm going to be brief here. I got a few quick questions for you. At the end of that, I'll tell you exactly, you know, what are components of our solution that might make a difference for you. And then from there, you can tell me whether or not it makes sense for us to take the next step.

Is that cool with you? Right. So I kind of use a mini, mini upfront contract there and then go, because now I've set the stage. I'm going to ask you a few quick questions, then I'll give you, and then you'll determine, right? So have you, have you like, how do you set the stage for the conversation? Because another thing that, and the reason I reintroduced that after not using it for a little while is because there's always that anxiety when somebody picks up the phone that they're, they, they just don't want the conversation to go very long. And so that's why my, my thought is the reason that somebody says, Hey, I'm not interested or I'm going into a meeting right now is because they do have time.

They just don't have this much time. And because I don't know who you are, I'm not going to assume that this is going to take longer than I want it to. Right. So that's why I'm always going to say, no, this isn't a good time. But if I quantify and then say, Hey, five questions, five minutes, now all of a sudden my, your expectations are clear and you sit and listen. So have you worked any of that into the flow of how you approach things? A hundred percent. So some people use that right off the bat and I use it a little bit more similar to how you do, where I do my traditional opener that I already used. And then if I get the, the biggest thing is if I get like a competitor or if I get a pricing objection, I don't use it there because I'm going to handle that objection appropriately.

I use it when I get any dismissive objection, which is, uh, I'm not interested or I'm busy or I'm in a meeting or I'm jumping into a meeting because now I'm basically, anytime somebody's really being a jerk and just trying to swap me away, I basically say like, look, man, I know you weren't sitting there twiddling your thumbs. Like, can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling? And then you can tell me where it fit. And it totally disarms them. And they say, fine. And I've booked tons of meetings off that because I guarantee if you just try to go in with your pitch right after that, they're going to be so pissed off. They're going to be so pissed off. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the big problem is like, everybody thinks the pitch is what matters and it doesn't.

And I, you know, and I had to learn this, right? I mean, for years when I was cold calling, I thought it was the elevator, you come up with a kick-ass elevator pitch and you say it until your ears bleed and, you know, you trip over a few opportunities and that's the game. Um, I don't have, I don't even have an elevator pitch anymore. You know what I mean? Like I literally don't because my answer is always dynamic based on what you do. Right. Cause somebody will say, well, what do you do? I'll be like, I do a lot of shit. You know, let me, let me ask you a few questions. Like what's your role? What do you do? And this, dah, dah, dah, dah. And what's your, you know? And then, okay, well people like you and your type of role in that situation, this is what I do versus people like you and that type of role.

This is what I do. Right. I made a post the other day and I put up a picture of Exhibit, you know, from Pit My Ride. And so the post is that nobody gives a crap about the history of your company or your elevator pitch. The elevator pitch is dead. If you get them to an elevator and all of a sudden start saying Carter was 10,000 customers and this and that, nobody cares. And so when Exhibit sells his, uh, whatever bathtub in a truck, he doesn't start the episode with a bathtub in a truck. You'd be horribly confused. And so what he does is he says, yo, dah, you told me you like this. And so I put a bathtub in your truck. You told me you like to swim. So I put the jets in the sky and all that stuff.

And so he says, you told me this. And so that's why we do this. And that's the philosophy behind discovery, behind cold calls. Cold calls are really just a compressed discovery call. And if you can get really, really good at cold calling, it'll actually make you shut up more in a discovery call. Why? Tell me, cause I like that. I think I know where you're going with that. Like why, why will you be better at discovery if you do a really good job cold calling? So it's a couple different reasons. So you ever track talk to listen ratio? Oh yeah. Exactly. And so that's the first thing is in a cold call. If you can't get past those first 30 seconds, or if you can't catch their interest in a very, very few number of words, you're screwed.

In a discovery, you have the luxury that ignorantly, you may be able to talk at a prospect for 30 minutes. Yeah. You don't have that in a cold call. Right. The second thing is in a cold call, I think of a cold call as an hourglass. And so the hourglass is constantly spinning down sand. If you can get past the first 30 seconds, the hourglass will continue to spin down sand. Every time you can ask a question and handle an objection well, you get a little bit more sand in that hourglass. There's some high watermark or high sand mark where if you're asking up good questions and you identify very quickly one or two pain points and handle those objections extremely well, you can cut it off and book the meeting when it's hot.

And so if you can't get one or two or three pain points, nobody ever picks up the phone. Hey, we do this. Boom. Let's meet. Never happens. The money is made in handling the first, second, and third objection and booking the meeting. And that's discovery. Cool, man. Well, shit, man. I think we could do a whole training on this stuff, you and I. We have a very, I think we use different phrases for different things, but we got a very similar approach to the tactics around and the structure. And I think this is cool where it ended up, right? Because we talked about the structure of your days, the structure of time management, but also getting down to the structure of how you make a call to your point, how you introduce yourself matters, what that initial value proposition is, how you handle that objection, and then how you close it out.

You can, if you parse those things out, you can actually start to micro test each one of those components, right? Where it's like, okay, I'm going to change my intro. I'm going to keep the same flow of my conversation. We're going to change the intro a little bit there and see what happens to it. Are you big into like testing different approaches or like, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you evolve? Right. And so it's a lot easier in email because it's written. You can do a little bit of that stuff in chorus and gong, but it's not perfect yet. Right. But the bottom line is back in the old days, you literally have a T chart when we were selling insurance. And I would try this opener 17 times, try the other opener 17 times.

And I know you've told some stories about that. And I would do that. And so I can do that in the masses with 30 SDRs. I'd be like, all right, we've done pricing tests. We're like, everyone's going to quote at this price and they're going to do these features. And then everyone else is going to do a la carte. We're going to see where it comes. And so that's the beauty of being in leadership is when people just sit back in the chair and they say, oh, sell the dreams, sell the vision, break it down into processes and digestible pieces for your team and then poke and tweak and tweak one variable at a time. And you can have a main enablement do a little bit of this, but your job as a manager, is to figure this stuff out.

It's not to throw it over the fence of the training team and just sit there and coach a bunch of deals. I mean, that's actually, I was having a conversation recently with somebody where like, I think the inadvertent outcome of the proliferation of enablement, right? So enablement's come on strong over the past few years, as far as like a really big, you know, good department. Most companies are investing in sooner and that. But I think an inadvertent outcome is like a lot of managers have just thrown up their hands to say, oh, that's their job. You know what I mean? Like, oh, their job is to train my team. I'm going to help close deals. So to get in the weeds like you're talking about and leverage the team to test out certain shit and be there with them, making those calls, sending those, you know what I mean?

Like that's what real leadership and management does. And that's where teams get excel and circle all this through. That's where the people who don't buy into that mentality will filter out really fast. And you'll have those kids who are driven, who want to be metric driven. You know what I mean? And that team that'll keep figuring things out as you go. Exactly. Cool. Awesome, man. Well, I love this conversation. Let's, so let's, cause I'd like to kind of keep these around 45 minutes or so. What's a good way for people, like, what do you want people to know now as far as what Carta, what you're doing, like, um, where to go find you, are you guys hiring and talk to me a little bit? Definitely.

So Carta is an awesome place to work at. We keep a pretty high energy and pace. You can tell I've had a couple of Red Bulls today. You want to come in and you want to be number one, you want to start a company, you want to be a CXL, uh, come to play. And you can also just email me directly at Armand, A-R-M-A-N-D at Carta, C-A-R-T-A.com. Love it. You can just send me an email. We're hiring like crazy. We're backed by some of the best VCs in Silicon Valley. And we're about 900 people. So we're right in that sweet spot where we're still small enough to be a nimble startup, but we're not this big conglomerate. So you can still grow quite a bit. And I'm 27 years old. And I think I'm an example of that.

Yeah, that's huge, man. Kudos to you. I was nowhere near where you are at 27 years old. So good for you. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much for this time. I appreciate it. It's for everybody else out there. Hopefully you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did and got some stuff out of it. Because we talked about some real tactical shit here that you should go back and listen to and apply. Because there's some gems in this one. So thank you very much, Armando, for this conversation. I appreciate it, brother. Thanks, John. And everybody out there, just as always, you know, if you're having a shitty day, try to go make somebody smile. Because even if you had the shittiest day ever, if you made somebody smile, you know you had a good day.

And we need to spread a little bit more positivity in this world. So, everybody, have a great week and make it happen. Thank you all very much.