178: Darryl Praill & Shawn Finder On The State Of Sales In 2021

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James, Say What Sales Buckley, and this is the latest edition of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to our partners, Sales Loft, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, Proposify, Zoom Info, Loom Cube, and Rise for all that you do to make these episodes possible. Today, we're bringing two people to the table that have incredible wisdom, insights, and value to offer you, our listeners. Daryl Prail, CRO at Vanilla Soft, and Sean Finder, the founder of AutoClose, are going to be joining John in the studio. These two are going to chop up some great topics with John that range from sales culture to diversity, hiring and firing reps for many reasons, and finding the right fit for acquisition.

You better believe that that's a two-way road. This conversation is full of fire, and we're ready to hop in. But first, I want to let you know that you can now follow JBSales on Instagram to get all our sales tips, techniques, clips, and suggestions. Just search JBSalesTraining, all one word, and smash that follow button on Instagram. This is a new channel for value that we're really excited to bring to you, our loyal audience that supported us in our growth over the years. We'll see you there. Let's pass it to John, Daryl, and Sean to get it started. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrow's Make It Happen Monday. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. I am here with two very special guests who I've actually had on the podcast, on webinars before, but separately.

But now they're combined to do some pretty cool shit here. So, Sean Finder, the sales GM at AutoClose, and Daryl Prail at CRO at Vanilla Soft. How are you guys doing today? Go ahead, Daryl. I was going to say, if you go first, no, I'll go first. We're too polite on each other. All right, Daryl, let's go to that. You can't script that stuff. I'm doing fantastic, and I'm anxiously waiting to have a freaking break because it's been as stressful as hell 2020. Sean, how are you doing, my friend? I'm doing amazing. It's great to be back on the show, John. We had a lot of fun last time. I'm sure we're going to have a lot of fun this time. Absolutely. Actually, and let's do this because for context here, the acquisition, right?

Let's talk about that. And first of all, why? And so, Daryl, if you could just, for those people who don't know, and I can't imagine there isn't too many people out there at this point, but what's Vanilla Soft? And then talk about the connection between AutoClose and what you guys are doing now, because I think that's a really interesting story here that'll set the stage for the rest of this conversation. All right. So, this will take like a half an hour. You're okay with that, right? That's not a problem. And the podcast is over now. And we're done. That's right. And our new guest speaker is my dog. Okay. So, Vanilla Soft is a sales engagement platform. So, we'll be in the same category as vendors you might know, like Sales Loft or Outreach.

But the difference between us and them is just knowing your lane for us. Our lane is SMB. And traditional real-world industries, finance, insurance, healthcare, higher ed, that kind of stuff. So, that's what we do. That's where we differ. I think you know the game by now, because last I saw almost 75% of the industry is using sales engagement. So, I'll make an assumption that I don't have to explain it. Why auto-close and why the acquisition? Brilliant, brilliant question. We knew that we needed to take our email game to the next level of the company. That's the first part. And so, you always have two decisions when you do that. Do we build or do we buy? When you buy, one of the things you're thinking, people often think, well, you're buying IP.

But the reality is you're not buying IP. You're buying IP plus people, plus stuff you don't have. I can research and learn the IP. But if I get people and IP at the same time, my time in the market and the time to serve my customers goes up dramatically. Second point there is how we saw things changing. We saw the industry very much going into, how do I put this? Sales engagement isn't for everybody. So, for example, when we sell, so our audience, notice I said real world industries. I didn't say high tech. So, here's the thing. I'll throw this out there, John. I'd love to get your take on it. Most of the industry is shaped by what high tech is doing. Oh, we need AI because AI is an early adopter.

Oh, we need this because that's what high tech does. But there's the rest of the world who is not an early adopter. And they don't care about AI. As our CEO likes to say, my clients, they care about ROI, not AI. So, that's kind of a context. So, when we look at it that way, there are a gazillion people out there whose whole definition of sales engagement is what I would call sales nurturing. In other words, I'm just going to use email and do a single channel engagement. When I have a pulse, boom, they did something to email. I'm going to now pick up the phone and call them because now I have engagement. I don't need text. My industry doesn't use text. My industry doesn't use LinkedIn. I mean, my goodness, half the industries I serve are not found on LinkedIn.

So, what Autoclose gave us was a twofer. Actually, it gave us a threefer. It gave us the email IP that we're going to have to build. By the way, they're best in class. It gave us the people, which are impossible to find. And it gave us that sales nurturing channel to meet the industries of our target audience. So, that's a long-winded answer. I apologize. No, I think you're spot on. And I couldn't agree more as far as the tech bubble, right? I have to constantly be reminding my team that, look, you take one step out of San Francisco and SaaS, and it's like sales 1985 all over again. You know what I mean? Like, this whole talk about AI and tools replacing sales professionals. You can get really caught up into it, right?

But once you realize that, you know, there's a billion other industry, like that's like 1% of the actual industries out there. It's the one that, you know, tech gets all the buzz because all the money that gets thrown at it. And I think it's also somewhat insulated right now because they all eat their young, right? I mean, tech just sells to tech right now. But then there's a whole host of other people that can benefit from some of the mistakes that tech makes and really the authenticity piece of it. But there's that balance. And that's like, Sean, I wanted to kind of come to you as far as that future, right? Because, you know, I get asked this all the time and, you know, I think you probably do too, which is, you know, what is the future of communication?

And is email, you know, going to die eventually? Like where, because of your expertise in this field and this type of thing, like, where do you see and why did you ultimately agree to get acquired by Vanilla Soft here? Well, I want to hear this, Sean. What did you agree to get acquired by Ask? Well, the first reason was like, who wouldn't want to work with Daryl? Check off the Ask kiss. That's right. Okay. Boom. He gets to keep his job. But the honest truth was, John, like when I look at the industry one, two, three years from now, I see it all becoming multi-channel and we were only focused on email. So, you know, the same way Daryl was looking at, you know, how do they integrate emails, looking at how do we get all those other channels?

Now we can build it, but as a bootstrap company at the time and not having the resources, you know, it would probably take us, you know, a year, year and a half, two years to build those. And we would just keep falling behind our, you know, our competitors. So, you know, what this acquisition did for us was, you know, A, our clients were asking for the multi-channel and it kind of expedited that whole entire process because, you know, strategically enough, you know, VanillaSoft had those multi-channels that we don't currently offer. So, it gives us the option to now provide, A, the email to our clients as well as that multi-channel approach, which I think is just going to get bigger and bigger in 2021.

Yeah, definitely. Now, there's something, though, that we haven't talked about here, if you don't mind me, John. Please. One of the things that I didn't mention, so everything I told you was spot on, but then when we looked at articles, English is not good for me today, eat alcohol, is at one point early on the process, Sean kind of says, yes, we have articles and we have data unlimited. And I was like, whoa, back the truck up. What the hell is data unlimited? I've not heard of data unlimited. And so, data unlimited is, it's another lead contact source, B2B USA. And I'm like, oh, because again, in the markets I serve, they're not, with no offense to these vendors, they're not buying Zoom info because that's a whole different price point that they can't afford.

But they need the list. You know, if I look at the inbound inquiries we get from our support and our customer success teams, then almost the number one question is, can you guys recommend a place to get data? So, one of the things that Sean didn't even talk about was data unlimited. So, now for us, you know, it was really interesting because when we were doing the FAQ, because, you know, you buy a company, those who've never acquired one, you spend like two weeks of hell going, what question might somebody possibly ask us and do we have the answer for that? And one of the questions we thought about was, well, who's your competition now? Has your competition changed? And it has, you know, so we would probably compete now against an Apollo or a Cognizm because you can come to us for one-stop shopping.

So, data plus sales nurturing plus sales engagement because, again, that's what our market needed. And I laugh, you talked about when you leave the tech bubble, you leave San Francisco. One of the biggest comments I see there over and over again is that if you look at many of the SDRs or BDRs out there and you say, hey, do you know what a full cycle sales rep is? They just look at you and their eyes are glazed over. But, again, that's our market. Like, Sean's laughing right now. Well, I actually, my whole mentality around this is I actually think we're going to go back to full cycle sales. I think we are too. I've been getting asked that a lot lately. Yeah, I think that SDRs or traditional SDRs are going to be folding up under marketing and operations and they're going to be tech people that use technology to gain insights and then feed over really high quality leads with ABM to full cycle sales reps that then run it all the way through.

Which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing as long as you're paying attention to it and leveraging it the right way. So with that, from a context standpoint of kind of what that potential future looks like, omni channel, full cycle sales, right? What should sales leaders be looking at from a directional standpoint with their teams? Because I still feel like we're in this weird spot right now in sales where we're like where manufacturing was, where we're teaching the machines how to do our jobs, right? And we look at executives or managers like Gen Xers, right? For the most part, like we're, you know, the decision makers right now. And we grew up with the volume game, like 50 dials, 100 dials, like here's a list, rip it through, whatever it was.

Yes, we were full cycle sales. But now everybody kind of understands quality is the issue, right? Like we need to be more ABM and all this other stuff. But you know what's really hard to coach and train to? Quality. You know what's really easy to coach and train? Numbers. So did you make your 50 dials? And if you didn't, I'm going to whack you over the head for it. Because that's easy for me to measure. That's easy for me to look at. But it's not. So we're in this weird transition where I think everybody understands quality is the answer. But we're still in this quantity world. So what role does leadership have in this whole equation of how do we sustain growth while maintaining credibility and authenticity with our approach?

And I'm going to put that to you first, Daryl. And then I'm going to go to Sean. Okay, I'm going to give you a different answer. I know I am. Sean will give you the right answer. He's much smarter than I am. In fact, even in the due diligence that I'm going to, basically, Sean, all the references came back. Yeah, Sean's the closer. So he's the guy to give you the real answer. That's why I started with you. But you should have started with him. What were you thinking? But I will tell you, I do have an interesting perspective. Simply because I was the CMO. And then partway through the year, I became the CRO. And as much as any CMO thinks they understand sales. And, hey, I carried a bag. I was the VP of sales.

That was years and years ago. You get reacquainted with it. So I come with a fresh set of eyes. And it's interesting. Your question really dovetails with kind of what I was thinking. Literally, I woke up at 2 o'clock in the morning about three nights ago. And I had to write this down on my phone. I came up with three things. Things that we need to teach. Things that it's incumbent upon the leaders to teach. And it has nothing to do with structure. Nothing to do with structure. And it's interesting you mentioned quality. Because I would suggest this is quality. These are the three biggest things I'm seeing now on my own team and with some of my clients. Number one, a sense of curiosity. It sounds crazy.

Too many reps don't – and I'm sorry if I'm generalizing and you can yell at me. Too many reps aren't naturally curious. I don't know if you're freaked out. I don't know if you're thinking, what do they ask me a question? I don't know. And you're so focused on going through the qualification. Park that shit. Ask a question. And in fact, I saw a wonderful thing the other day. It was great. It was about shifting from W to TED. You know, the W being the why, the what, the who, whatever, right? And, you know, John, you probably know this. But I'd never heard of it before. And I was like, crazy. TED being, you know, tell me why that is. Explain to me what you mean by that. Can you describe a situation?

And, see, that's the whole curiosity thing. I find the reps, you are leaving money on the table simply because you're not curious. And it's incumbent upon leadership to either create the curiosity or to hire reps who are naturally curious. Second one I would say is initiative. You mentioned Gen X. Is this a Gen X versus a millennial thing? I don't know. Is this I'm an old man versus I'm now saying get off my grass thing? Probably. You talk about being 40. But I find so many people, they're not taking initiative, initiative to either build their brand, initiative to create some content, initiative to research their ICP. So leadership's got to instill that and actually hold them accountable. Now, the last one, I don't know if I've heard on your show before, John.

You may hate me for this one. Head games. I find so many reps are busy playing head games. Oh, John said that. He's, what does John really mean by that? Is he saying this? Do I, is he saying I'm doing that? Here, let me go text my buddy. It's offline and not actually ask my boss. And let me, or let me interpret what an email means as opposed to picking up the phone and saying, what did you mean by this? These are the three things. Basically, we as sales leadership need to teach our reps how to be adults. And it sounds stupid, but there, I put it out there. I'll be controversial. I think you're, I like all of those. You know, I call it the give a shit factor, right? Yeah. Like, if you actually give a shit, you'll be curious, right?

And then the games, like, I can't tell you how much drama I have sliced out of my life. Because when I first started my first company, Thrive Networks, I was actually talking to Chris the other day about this. The amount, and I am not even joking right now, you could ask anybody in that company, that probably 50% of my time building that company was purely about playing a psychiatrist with the people. Like, off, you know, like night discussions, morning walks, like, you know, bickering between. And the amount of shit we could have gotten done if we stopped all that and just were just grownups and had direct conversations and no bullshit was what we would have been 10 times bigger than what we did.

So, so, Sean, from your perspective, what do you think leadership now, you know, with that, with those pieces there, where do we need to do, like, what do we need to do to help these kids get to that point where they give a shit? And what do we need to be holding them accountable for as well? Well, I think, you know, I think there's a lot of, for sales leaders especially, I think next year there's going to be a lot of unknowns. Yeah. You know, there are a lot of unknowns. People are throwing forecast quotas, budgets out there, but nobody really knows what's going to happen next year. So, I think, you know, getting sales, SDRs or sales reps to adapt. I think adaptivity is important because, you know, outside sales people need to learn how to be inside sales now because you can't be doing as much outside sales.

So, there's certain stuff you have to do. I always tell this, and I, you know, I only hire sales people, competitiveness. You have to be competitive. I think sales people need to be competitive because you need to either love to win or hate to lose or a combination of both. So, if I had to say two, I would say sales reps have to learn how to adapt to this new environment and definitely as a sales leader, you know, competitiveness. And one more thing I would say about sales leaders is make it easier for those sales reps by consolidation. I think there's way too many tools out there. You have to learn where if you can find a tool that can combine two, three, four of those different things into one, that's going to make a big difference with sales reps as they make the adjustment.

Do you think the tools, though, are stunting the growth of sales professionals? Because I almost want every kid who gets into sales, give them a set of encyclopedias and say, you have to go door to door. You don't know anybody and you got to sell this shit before you can get a job, right? So that they learn how to communicate with people, they learn how to take a beating, and they're not all looking for that. Where's the – because it drives me like, hey, where's the template for this? Hey, John, what's – it's like, shut the fuck up. Just figure it out. Yeah. But I think we've lost the figure it out factor here. Like, it's always like, tell me what to do. And Morgan and I have this whole keynote that we do of – and yeah, you know, I'm generalizing here, but Gen Xers versus millennials and how we were the last generation to figure it out.

Like, we were before technology, and when I was bored, my mom would kick me out of the house and say, go fucking, you know, be home by dinner, right? And I'd burn shit down. I'd, you know, I'd light stuff on fire. I'd break stuff. But I'd figure it out. Where now, and I see this with my daughter, you know, school from this hour to this hour. Then they have soccer practice from this hour. Then they get there to play the iPad for 30 minutes. Then they get their friends for two hours. So literally every moment of these kids' lives have been structured, they get out into the real world with managers like me and you and say – and we say, figure it out. And they look at you like sideways, like, what are you talking about?

Figure it out. Tell me what to do. And then our reaction is, here's a script. Here's a template. You don't know what to do. I'm going to tell you exactly what to do. And it turns them into robots. So what's that middle ground there? Well, I mean, I know one thing. Somebody told me two years ago when I was asking, like, why isn't your sales growing? He goes, well, do you want me to be doing sales or do you want me to be inputting my CRM all day? So I think the one thing is, you know, tools is one thing, but I think all the additional tasks that salespeople have to do. And at the end of the day, if you want a salesperson to sell, like, let them go sell. But as you said, like, the templates, the inputting after every Zoom meeting, like, what was that about?

What was the price? And if you're filling out a whole, you know, five, seven lines on each person, I think there's just a lot. And I think, you know, sales reps, at the end of the day, they have quotas to hit. They got commissions to make. They got numbers to make. But there's way too many tools out there. And sales reps are getting given way too many tools to be able to actually succeed where you just, you know, your job is to go and sell. And we're in that problem now, John, like, where we've invested so much into our tech stack, right? You want conversational analysis? No problem. We got you. You want salesmen enablement? Yeah, we got you covered. You want sales engagement? Hey, I got this product called Vanilla Soft.

You want Salesforce.com? We got that going, too. You want an email signature? We got an email signature. You want intent data? We got intent data. You want ABM? We use Terminus. We're going to tell you everything they're doing, give you buying signals. Up the ass. Yeah. And my head of sales, God bless her, Catherine Robles, she started at the start of November, she's come back to me and she said to me, Daryl, tone it down. Like, shut off the tech and let's just get basic. And she and I are fighting over this in a loving, combative way that's constructive, which is I'm saying, like, why wouldn't they want to use Navigator? She goes, Daryl, they can't even freaking brand their own profile. Why the hell are we giving them Navigator?

And I'm like, you realize we have a number to hit. So there is this tension inside that we're using often tech to what we think is going to enable us hitting goals when in reality, often it actually makes the situation worse. Yeah. And it turns us, like my fear with all these tools is it turns us into robots. It turns us, it takes away the give a shit factor. It takes away the curiosity. It takes away the authenticity. Right? And so this balance I find is, is, is fascinating to me to try to figure out how to navigate. Cause I, I mean, I say it all the time to my team. I go, look, we're, we're, we got about five years. Right. Cause people, I mean, um, you know, Kevin Dorsey, like we, we actually had a conversation a while back and he's like, John, what the fuck are we doing, man?

Like really, like seriously, like, like, do we really need to be doing this at this point? Like we're teaching these kids, like it's like on the sinking Titanic. You know what I mean? Um, and I said, no, you know what I'm trying to do here, Katie, that makes me sleep at night is the kids who give a shit. Um, that, those are the ones I'm trying to reach. I'm trying to give those kids over the next five years, the ones who care, I'm trying to give them the tools, the skills, the resources to be successful. Now, the ones who are literally just going through the motions and just want to hit that, you know, button to send out a million emails or make generic cold calls. Quite honestly, I don't give a fuck about them.

I really don't like if they, if they go and get a salary job and fold up under marketing and operations, good for you. But the kids who do give a shit, and I think unfortunately that's a very small percentage. Those are the ones I'm trying to connect with here over the next few years to give them a chance. So let me ask you a question because I was having this conversation literally yesterday with my CEO where I was saying to him, we're talking, we're talking about this. And I was saying, you know what, you know, we've not done this yet where we use, you know, the third party tools to do psychological assessments and stuff of reps. We've used our own gut. Maybe it's time because I think we need to hire and put in there, you know, I, you know, I don't know if I call these vendors up who sell this product and say, is there a give a shit factor to your, your psychological profile?

Because that's who I want to hire. But my question for you is, okay, fair enough. I'm where you're at. We're there together. We agree. Twenty two ones are in the corner. I'm looking at my team. Not everybody has the give a shit factor. So John, I'm taking this advantage, free advice. You're the man. Do I let them go or do I keep on and hire someone who gives a shit or do I, do I believe I can instill a give a shit into them? I think it starts, well, my opinion. Because John, he's going, oh my God, you can't do that. You can't put them on the spot. No, no, no, please do. I think it starts kind of where we started, which is leadership, right? Because I've always said that you can't get people to do more than their job unless you really paint a true vision for them, right?

As leadership, if I don't see how I fit into this bigger picture and I don't see what that vision is and how I can help get there, I'm going to do my job. And if I just do my job, you're going to take your chances of whether I give a shit or not. And I'll do just enough to not get fired, like the whole office space one, right? Like, you know what happens when you have eight bosses, Bob? You do just enough not to get fired, right? And that's, so I think, first of all, I don't think enough leaders out there stand up and say, look, like, yes, there's a lot of uncertainty here, but here's the plan. This is what we're trying to go. Like, I don't understand if I'm a leader and I want to get my business sold, I don't understand why you wouldn't tell everybody in the company, look, our goal is in the next two years to sell this fucker for whatever it is.

But let me tell you, you're all going to get a piece of it if we get there. Because guess what? The people that don't want to be part of that ride, they'll go away. The people that do will be in and they'll be invested. When I got fired from Staples, okay, my CEO was trying to play this game of, oh no, we were still Thrive Networks, this little $10 million company, even though we had gotten bought by Staples. And we were fighting it. We were literally fighting it. And I was one of the biggest ones who was fighting it. And they eventually fired me. And I said to my CEO, I said, Jim, you got to do, you have to do this. When I leave, you have to stand up and say, all right, everybody, here's the new world order.

This is where we're going. I understand you didn't sign up for this. Okay. So if you don't want to be on this train with this new world, we are Staples now, whether we like it or not. Okay. So we're on this train. If you don't want to be part of this train, let's figure out a nice transition for you. I get it. But if you do get on this train, shut the fuck up about all the bickering and all the little shit that you guys are bitching about. Let's go. And he never did that. And it floundered, floundered, floundered. And then Staples eventually sold it off to somebody else because it never worked. So I think first and foremost, Daryl, we got to look internally on ourselves to say, are we, are we, are we giving them something to give a shit about?

Right. And then give them a chance to show that they give a shit through various ways. And I don't know what those are for every company, but then if they don't, if we paint that vision, we give them, uh, you know, examples of how to, and, and, and kind of guide them along that path. And they show that then keep them on board, right? Coach ability, as you know, is one of the biggest traits that you should be looking for. Like, I don't care right now if you're not good at what you do, but if I give you some advice or give you some guidance and you take that next level, okay, you're somebody I can work with, but if I put you in that position and you don't show that you give a shit after that, yeah, then I'll fire, I'll fire you and I'll find somebody.

So, so Sean, heads up, Sean, we're going to be taking this clip that just went down and showing this at our sales kickoff. Just a heads up. There we go. And John, I completely, I, you know, a lot of what you said, I do completely agree with. I know what we don't, when we went through the acquisition, we couldn't tell the only people that had kind of shares or equity were the only ones that we could tell because the other ones, you know, they wouldn't understand the transition, but, um, I do agree that, you know, people have skin in the game. They are more, um, interested in where that vision is. All right, y'all. These three can really bring the heat to the show and I'm loving the authenticity and passion that they bring to the conversation.

You can send me your sales wins at james at jbarrows.com to be featured on next week's episode. Today, we're giving a shout out to Mark Roberts, who recently signed up for JB Sales on Demand through our friends at SDR Nation. Mark went back to watch Filling the Funnel over and over and began to use the Excel spreadsheet provided in the session to tear out his accounts. Developing a criteria for which accounts to focus on and why was instrumental in designing a process and structure for his outreach. That's a huge step towards sales greatness. Keep going, Mark. You got this and we're proud to have you in our corner at JB Sales. Subscribe today like Mark did at on-demand.jbarrows.com to change your sales results on a consistent basis.

This is where you'll get access to all our tips, techniques, courses, processes, webinars, live events, and much, much more. How do you plan on investing in your own development and growth? JB Sales on Demand can and will help you achieve the growth that you've been searching for. Sign up today. That URL again is on-demand.jbarrows.com. We'll see you there. But, Sean, let me ask you this. Was it your goal to sell or was it your goal to build this company and see what happened with it? Well, I think deep down, everyone's goal is always to sell. But, you know, was I looking to sell at the time when this happened? This was just Daryl and me meeting at a conference and having a five-minute talk that turned in.

But I think my goal is, and the same vision with the four people that had some options and shares in the company, all of us shared the same goal. See, and that's my point. Like, there's these founders out there that they know they want to sell in a year. They know what that goal is. But they hire people under this other umbrella of, oh, everything's special. And we're a nice little happy company here, right? And I think that's toxic. Because your actions, you know what I mean? And you could say stuff all you want. But when you have those closed-door meetings and all those things, then, you know, that pettiness that you were talking about there before, Daryl, that's when that comes out. Because people start asking questions.

That's the exact reason why people do that. Because people aren't being forthright with them, right? I mean, you know, one of the things that I love about some of the leaders that I follow are their transparency into their business. Like, yes, there's certain things that we can't tell our employees for various reasons, liability, whatever it is. But the more you can open up the books as far as showing, hey, look, this is our profitability. Hey, look, this is what our, you know, gap and out, whatever it is. Like, this is us, right? My CFO, finally, after a while, we did that. Once a month, he would get up and he would literally show the full P&L about what we were doing and where we were investing and where the profits were and everything else.

And it was an education game for a lot of their sales reps there who were like, holy shit, that's why we made that investment. Or holy shit, that's why we can't do that. All right, cool. There was that transparency and got everybody bought into it, right? Now, but I'll argue with that. So, yes, everything you just said, everything John just said, if you're a sales leader and you listen to that, yes, be freaking transparent. For the love of God, I mean, show some people some courtesy and some respect. They're putting it over time. They deserve it. But it goes both ways. I've had it with the sales reps where I've done exactly that. I, you know, I have a reputation of being blunt. And I, when I became CRO, I opened it up by saying, you're going to know where you stand with me.

It's going to be black and white. I will tell you whether you want to hear it or not. And I had a rep about a month ago. We got into it only because I had somebody saying, you know, everybody should talk to this rep. And I'm like, okay, it's a two hour conversation, but where we broke through the challenge was about halfway through. I said, I don't get it. I've been blunt with you. I've been transparent because I don't believe you. And I said, you don't believe me. Why don't you believe me? And he goes, well, because you let so-and-so go a month after you started. And I said, yes. Well, he was knocking it out of the park. You think so? Yes. No, he wasn't. Let me walk you through the numbers.

Let me walk you through the calls I sat in on. Did you listen to any of his calls? No. Did you look at his numbers beyond that one month? He had one good month? No. It's just what he told me. So why the hell didn't you come to me? I said, just one more. You talk about the balance sheet. I went further and I said, let me show you something. When I made a decision to restructure the team, people had to go. He was one of them. It was unfortunate. He was underperforming. He was let go. But because of that, I freed up this budget and I hired these people. Are you liking these people? Oh my gosh, they're awesome. Are they helping you close more deals? Yes. Well, that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done that hard decision over here.

But you just made some assumptions that I fired his ass with no cause. And I gave you permission to come to me. So that's my point, John, is that it's a two-way street. Leaders need to be honest. But reps, stop with the freaking head games. You got a question with your leader? Ask them. Because you know what? They're in that position because they can take the hard questions. And if they can't, then that's not a leader you should follow. That's not a leadership. Exactly. In which case, you should apply to Vanilla Soft. Just to add to that, I do think a lot of things need to be public. I know about 18 months ago, we actually didn't show any numbers. And then we started to build out a KPI sheet.

So just like Daryl said, the SDRs each know how each SDR is doing. It comes almost to competition. Like if you look at John and John's making 10 demos a day and I'm only doing two. And it's in front of the entire company. You can see exactly the KPI, what revenue that person's bringing, even marketing. I mean, development, every little thing. And I know Daryl and I, we've been working on becoming everything public in Slack. It really changed the game for us because it held people accountable. So people that actually weren't performing, it's not like they only know they're not performing. Now the entire company knows that they're falling behind. It's time to pick up some Slack. And I'll go one step further.

I want to give a shout out here to Sean and his whole crew. When you do an acquisition, everybody always assumes that the bigger company just assumes everything of the smaller company. The smaller company adapts. So they get the, you know, Sean got a vanilla side email. Well, then Sean's going to get accounts and all that stuff. Well, we actually rationalized the tech stack. You know, we'll keep some of ours. We'll keep some of yours. Because when we looked at their KPIs and how they tracked it and how it was impacting the results, they were doing a far better job of it than we were. So there's a perfect case and point of, you know, that was the getting the people because you want to be honest.

You want to be forthright and transparent. That's leadership. Yeah, it is. And I think it's probably one of the harder things to do is to foster that environment of being open so that reps can feel comfortable coming to you and not feel like they get their, you know, they're going to get their hands smacked for it. Because I used to tell my team, like, come on, guys, I need you to push me. But, you know, you know, Daryl, I got a little bit of a, you know, direct approach, you know, I've been known. And, you know, so I have an opinion and I have a very strong opinion. Usually it's because I've thought something through before we've had this conversation. So I'm going to push it on you. And I've always said to them, I go, look, if you have a better if you have a better point than I do, bring it up because because skillful discussion for me is really is really where I thrive.

Right. But they would never do it because they were scared shitless of me because I was so like in their face about it. And I think what one of the more healthy things that I did was you ever read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? I've not. So in there he goes through this values exercise. Right. It's kind of the why. Right. And I know the Ted and the why. But but it was more of a values piece. And what I ended up doing was I wrote out 12 personal guidelines to success for myself. And then when I had somebody hired, like when I was hiring somebody, I said, look, I just want to let you know these are my values. OK, so when you get feedback from me, this is where they're coming from. And I would actually interview on to see if they had similar values.

You didn't have to have the same values as me, but you had to have similar values. Because if you and I have the same values, we can argue, we can, you know, whatever, but we'll come to a good spot. But if we have different values, we're just going to yell at each other. Right. I mean, that's where we are here in the U.S. Like the U.S. values used to mean something. Right. The Constitution, whatever it was. But now you ask the left and the right and they come back to you with completely separate ideas of what their values are of what it's like to be an American, which is why we're just yelling at each other at this point. But if we can, if we have that core value set now, I think it fosters that openness, that transparency, that trust factor there.

Right. So what you just described, John, for those who don't know, you'll hear the cliches all the time of people saying, yeah, culture is really important to us. What the hell does culture mean? Everything John just said is culture. Yeah. It starts at the top. And if you're a leadership, you talk about leadership. If you're a leadership, you're CEO, you're head of sales, you're head of marketing, whatever, you're head of HR, whatever, however big or small you are. If they're not doing that, run away from that company as fast as possible, because you only function as a unit when what John describes is what's going on in your organization. I know that's firsthand. So that's what people mean when they say culture.

And funny story, my Twitter handle is Opinionated. So I'm with your brother on that. John, what are your thoughts on the culture? I mean, you've, but those who don't mean, I know, but auto-closes, auto-closes is a combination of people in North America and people in Europe. So talk about classes or cultures. How did you handle that? Well, and let me layer on top of that, Sean. Like, how did you, yeah, there's the tech fit and it gave you, you know, omni-channel and all that other stuff. But I'm guessing that if you weren't aligned with the values of Vanilla Soft, this probably wouldn't have happened. So how did you evaluate that? Well, I mean, you know, well, first, the first person I met, you know, Vanilla Soft was Daryl.

And obviously, he's very well known online. I saw him on LinkedIn. We met at the trade show. And then, you know, David, the CEO, just, you know, intelligent, came down to Toronto a few times to meet us. And the first thing actually David said to us was, we're all about culture. We're, you know, we're like one family. And that's the same way we are here at AutoClos. So he kind of, even before we started talking about, like, our financials, going over numbers, what we're looking for, anything, his first thing said, like, this is how I've run the company for 15 years. You know, customers first, et cetera, et cetera. And it just, you know, it resonated well with Marco and I, who was my partner, right from the beginning.

But, you know, David and Daryl both from the beginning. Well, Daryl first and then David. But right from the beginning, really set that bar for what the culture was of Vanilla Soft. Now that he's here, he knows that David's much nicer than Daryl. So there we go. Well, and I think that's something important for sales reps, too, who are looking for jobs, right? I mean, we were talking about looking for people that were hiring for this. But right now, this is a, I think it's a really good opportunity for sales reps who might have gotten fired or might be out looking for work, is to look that inside, identify those core values, and then go find companies that reflect that. Because guess what? I promise you your interview in that, if you align with a company or a person's values, I guarantee you that interview is going to go better, right?

I guarantee you your enthusiasm for that engagement, right? I mean, Sean, if that wasn't, if you had met Daryl the first time, and he immediately started diving into your numbers and this, and what are you doing here? You'd have been like, I don't know if I want to, I don't know if I want to do this here, right? But I'm guessing the conversation was pretty easy when you first engaged. Yeah, no, that was the thing. I mean, because first off, I wasn't even looking to get acquired. So when they approached me, it was like, you know, it has to be a, you know, the right opportunity for me. And I always say, you know, I always told myself, if I ever was going to get acquired, I have to say to myself, am I going to learn?

Am I going to continue to grow? And that was one thing, you know, with David's experience and Daryl's experience, and talking to them, I felt like it was a great opportunity for not only me, because this is what was about me. And, you know, everything I always do is all about my team. My team is my everything. I'm always more about the team in Serbia, because I, you know, care so much about them that, you know, and the other thing with David was, we're taking the entire team. If they would have said, we're only taking half the team, this wouldn't have happened. The reason why this was very attractive was, every single person on my team had a job after, and we'd have to let one person go, which to me was more important than the acquisition.

I actually, when COVID hit, I tell reps this all the time, how priorities shift, right? Like, we were going for $4 million this year, and 70% of our revenues got ripped away from us, because we do all on-site stuff, right? So, it went from $4 to $2.5 overnight, but my priority wasn't $2.5 anymore. My priority was retaining all my employees. So, I went, you know, stop, okay, let's drop everybody down to this level, let's figure out. And I think this also translates to the, you know, I'm going to go back on something you said, Sean, as far as competition. I'm a big believer in competition, but there's also a negative side of competition, right? It turns into an individualistic thing. And so, what was interesting is when we went from, okay, everybody's got their KPIs and whatever, to, nope, we're literally all at the same level.

Like, I put everybody's salary at exactly the same, including mine, but it was almost like this codifying thing. And I guess it was competition about us against everybody else. But how do you balance competition? And now, let's layer on top, and I'm taking this in a little bit of a different direction, but how do you layer this on top of attracting the talent that you want? Because with the whole, you know, you know, talk to Lori Richardson and all the, you know, women in sales, they, there's a lot of stuff that we put into our job descriptions as far as crush the quota and all this other stuff that really distract other people from even applying for the job because they're like, oh, that's one of those bro culture, too competitive.

So, how do you balance competition, right, with teamwork and still foster that? So, there's, whenever I look on a sales resume, there's two things I look for. One, have they played a sport? And two, have they worked at a bank? And people ask me, why do you play a bank? And here's the reason why. It's because banks train their employees. They put them on telemarketers. They give them, make them do the calls. They give them scripts. They go out. So, when they come to you, they've already been through a lot of training. Now, the competitiveness, it could be male or female. I mean, you know, I can tell, Daryl, one of my best customer success managers played on the national Serbian basketball team.

And when I actually hired her, that was one thing I looked at on her resume was what sport. Because I always find, I know in sales, I play competitive tennis. Salespeople that have a competitive background, they are, if they have to change from outside to inside, they're competitive. They're going to do what it takes to get there. If they have to make a sale, they have to close a deal, they'll go above and beyond the nine to five job. So, I always looked at two things, always banks and always to see if they played a sport. And it can be male, female, either one. Daryl, what do you think on that one? As far as balancing competitiveness versus team work and, yeah. And attracting and not limiting yourself.

Not have the pro culture. Yeah. So, I do a couple things. And so, we're very intentional. Okay. You know, a conversation David and I had several years ago was, as we looked around our executive table, we said, wow, a lot of white dudes here, eh? We're not hiding from it. We know that we had white dudes and we're trying to fix that. Not too long ago, I won't get into specifics because I don't want to embarrass the individual, but I had an individual come to me who was very key to this whole process and has been here for a long time. And say, have you looked at our diversity now? Like, the white dudes are almost a minority. Like, half our company are first-time immigrants or they're overseas. And there's every diversity going.

There's every gender identification going. Every sexuality going. And I've had some of these people come to me and tell me how safe they feel. And I don't mean white dude safe. I mean, you know, minority safe and that they didn't know they could work someplace that way. And when that, we started getting that, we were like, damn. And even when I hired Catherine, it was so interesting, right? Because David came to me and he just, you know, he gave me no direction other than I needed to, when he made me CRO, his only direction was I had to backfill with the head of sales because he wanted me to scale. And so I came back and I said, okay, Dave, this is what I hired. I hired a female who's originally from Columbia, but now is an immigrant and lives in Canada and she's killing it.

And by the way, she was referred to me through Scott, Lease, and a few other people in the community. So I've got third-party credibility. And all these people have culture. So what I look at is we look at walking the walk. That's a really, really, really, really, really big intentional thing for us. What I look at when someone comes to me is a little bit different. I look on their, I look at their resume and I make sure, yeah, you've got the basics so I can do something with you. And then I look to see what you're doing online. And I want to see, are you online to self-promote or are you online to give back to the community? So if you're not online at all, I won't look at you. Sorry, that social selling is a big-ass channel.

You may not like it, but it's a channel. You got to know it. And if you're online and giving back to the community, holy shit. And that's who I want because that's a culture of, I don't care if you're a guy or girl, the community sniffs out bullshit pretty fast. And if you've got a good reputation in the community, then I want you on my team. Yeah. And was that a, so you said that one day you kind of sat down and looked around and were like, holy shit. Like, was it a conscious now, wait, we got to open up our eyes in different ways here. And there was there initiative or did it start to just evolve in that way after you were conscious of it? There was awareness of it. It was funny. David asked to this, the CEO who, who just put it out there, right.

For everyone to said, you know, and, and we weren't, it wasn't all white dudes at the table, but you know, there was a lot of white dudes at the table and he put it out there. And so for that point, I don't, again, I've only been here three and a half years. Dave has been here for 15, so I can't speak before three and a half years, but in time I've been here, I can intentionally tell you that we are doing our damnedest to hire diversity. And it's always such a freaking balancing act of the right person for the job. But, if I can help somebody, if I have two candidates that are equal, but somebody perhaps has got more oppression societally, then I'm going to bias towards giving them a lift up.

Because for too many years, we as a society, society have not. So the pendulum is swinging back the other way. And, you know, what's interesting, my wife and I have this conversation. My, my son, I'm, I'm, I'm totally being not politically correct here, John. My son is a, he's on, he's in broadcast, the broadcast journalist. And he's very good at what he does. He's, I like to tell him that I'm way better, but apparently he actually is better and better looking and taller. It's annoying as hell. And we watch time and time again, how he misses out on job opportunities because he's a white dude. And what's so remarkable is my wife and I learned from him because he comes to us and this guy, this guy's 26 years old.

Is he bitter? Nope. He has to be like, this is the way it is. This is good. This is good, dad. This is a good thing. So if my 26 year old can teach me something about it, then who the hell am I to argue? Because he's right. Yeah. I agree. And Sean, I think you come from a little bit of a, cause you had such a diverse, I mean, immigrant background yourself, right? So was like your team, when you were building auto clothes, was it a conscious thing for you based on where you were hiring from? Or did it just organically happen because of kind of where you come from? So, well, I was here, you know, obviously in Toronto and my partner was in Serbia. Well, he's from Toronto, but he was born in Serbia.

So he had the connections out there. So early on, you know, the Eastern European mindset, it was, it was kind of like, you know, you, they're, they're very straight to the point. Like they tell you as it is, there's no being around. But, you know, it was when we, when we first hired our first few, then they kind of hired people that they thought would fit. So we have, we have a team in Serbia, we, you know, we have, we have Albania and, you know, we hired somebody from Albania. This was about six months ago and Albania and Serbia have their own issues. And, you know, and, and Mark was like, well, should we ask the people in Serbia? Like, and it was just like, we have Albania, we have Romania, we have Serbia.

So, you know, it's been amazing because a, you know, for me, I get to be more multicultural. I get to learn more about, you know, there's outside of North America, there's a whole different, you know, ballgame out there, but learn about them. And, you know, to be honest, our team has been just amazing together. You know, depending where everyone's from, we don't care where you're from. As long as you're a hard worker and you fit kind of that, our kind of culture, which we like, we're okay hiring anyone. And that, wait there, what Sean just said, that common thread, you know, like any, when you do acquisition, you know, you, you do your homework, but you don't know what you've got. Both ways, you know, Sean and his team are like, yeah, Pro could be an idiot.

Now he knows I am. Or what, right? And that was the, one of the things we were like, I remember David and I, and Sean, we were all, you know, weeks into it going like, like it was just like, you know, hand in glove. Our biggest challenge culturally, and I'm going to, you're going to laugh at me when I say this. Our biggest challenge, I'm embarrassed to say this, this is shameful, was the two companies use Slack differently. And to this day, we disagree vehemently on how to use Slack. Are we going to use threaded comments or inline comments? Oh, no. Oh, fuck, threaded comments, man. I hate them. Thank you. See that, Sean? He hates them. Yeah. We, we were, we changed this thread. I don't like him either.

I keep forgetting to do them. But yeah, we're very open. Like you can see absolutely anything in our, in any chat in our, in ours. But yeah, no, there's some disagreements. Hey, if that's the worst disagreement you guys have, you're doing pretty good. I would say one more is like trying to find a time to have a group meeting with everyone because everyone's all over the world. Well, yeah, there you go. Trying to find one hour that we have people in Europe and North America and all over that can meet. I think that's one of our, our issues, but it's great. Awesome. Well, look, I, you know, that's, we got, I got into this with about 15 different topics that we're, I wanted to talk to you guys about.

And I'm glad we landed on this one though, because I think leaders, you know, the, the, the overview was leadership in, in 2021. And I think, you know, we can dissect numbers, we can dissect, you know, whatever we should be holding people accountable to. But I think if we really focus on the values, the, the vision and the culture, those three pieces solve a lot of problems with the rest of that stuff. Right. Cause people, if people feel part of something that you do some really cool shit. Uh, so I, it sounds like you guys are on your way, uh, to doing some more cool shit, uh, which I'm, which I'm really psyched to hear about. So thank you, uh, any fine, any final words for anybody out there, if you're going into 2021, I think we're going to probably put this one out there pretty quick here.

So any final thoughts, Daryl about, uh, you know, what people should be thinking about, you know, the only final thought, uh, you talk about leadership and we talked a lot about from the leadership point of view or from the sales point of view, you know, just having learned the hard way for all those sales reps out there. So my advice to you on one little thing, it's all related to what we just said, when you're in that interview and they come back and they offer you the job, um, and you need a job and you find out that job offer. Let me tell you this right now. John is a thousand percent, right. If culturally it's not aligned with who you are, no matter how much money they're offering you, how exciting it is run as far away as you can from that.

It's not a judgment against them. It's just a precursor is an indicator of how successful you will be. You will hate the job. You will resent the people. You will be embarrassed or ashamed that it was ever on your resume for whatever reason. And it will bring discord into your life. Part of you getting the right job is making sure the cultural fit, the leadership is there and exactly what you need. I just, just, just trust your gut. Yeah, I agree with that. How about you, Sean? Anything? And last thing I would say is just, you know, you have to be flexible because there's going to be so unprecedented times coming up and nobody knows what's going to happen next year. That you have to be able to adapt and be flexible in any position you are within a company because we just don't know, you know, you can build a forecast, but, you know, every month that forecast needs to be looked at again because we don't know what's happening tomorrow.

So just be flexible and enjoy the ride. And if you're not sure of something, go freaking ask your boss as opposed to playing head games. Yeah, don't play head games. Leave the drama alone because that distracts from everything, right? And, Sean, you said, you know, agility and adaptability, I think, are going to be the two competitive advantages moving into next year. Like the companies that are agile, the people, the sales reps that are agile and can adapt to whatever's in front. I tell this to my daughter all the time. Like she was going, when school was going back this year, she didn't want to go back. She was, she actually wanted to be back. She wanted to be remote, but she's like, I don't want to go back to school because it's not going to be like last year, daddy.

You know, I don't want to wear a mask. I don't want to be six feet apart and all this other stuff. And I said, sweetheart, you're too young to really appreciate this. You're nine years old, but you got to hear this. You got to learn to adapt. Your number one skill is adaptability because you can't control what happened in the past. And if you're constantly comparing to what was, you're going to leave a, you're going to live a very, very hard life. But if you just look at what's in front of you and do what you can with it and do the best you can with it and adapt to it, you're going to be pretty happy moving forward here. If you have the right mentality. And she was like, oh, but you know, I don't know if she gets it yet, but hopefully she will sometime soon.

And hopefully every, all the reps listen to this. We'll get that a little bit too. So. Awesome. Well, look, everybody, thanks for listening. Hopefully you got some good nuggets out of this. And, you know, if it wasn't, you know, the tactic that you were looking for, hopefully the mentality that you were looking for to shift because this is a weird fucking year. But I think it's a good one to, to take a step back and really reassess what's important to you so that you can come out of this much stronger, I think on the other end. So thank you, Daryl. Thank you, Sean, for coming on board here, guys. I really appreciate it. And for everybody out there, as I always say, no matter how bad your day goes, go make somebody smile today.

Cause if you, even if you had a shitty day, if you made somebody smile, you know, you had a good day. So thank you all very much and make it happen. All right, everybody. I was super pumped for this episode and Daryl never disappoints me. His blunt approach that's straightforward really serves us well. And he and Sean really shed some light on some sensitive, but important topics. We know you got a lot out of the episode too. And again, don't forget to find us on Instagram at JB sales training to get all our tips and techniques daily. We're pumped to be able to bring you that fire to that platform. So we'll see you guys on Instagram. Don't forget to subscribe and get all our training courses, webinars, and events at ondemand.jbarrows.com or reach out to me directly to learn more.

I'm happy to have a conversation. JB sales on demand is sure to set you aside from your competitors and give you the skills needed to make an impact on your clients results. And of course, hit those revenue goals. This year has been a hell of a year, and we know that 2021 will be incredible. We'll see you in the new year. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. See you next time. And until then, sell better.