231: Doug Landis on How Product-Led Growth is Shifting the Marketplace

Hey everybody, so you're in for a treat here. I brought one of my good friends Doug Landis back on this podcast because I heard something the other day that kind of broke my mind when we were in an executive roundtable here talking about the growth and the new structure of sales. And so we went all over the place. Doug's an investor at Emergence Capital. They mostly focus on AI and those type of companies. But we talked about product-led growth and how that is shifting everything in this marketplace and therefore how our model as a sales organization needs to shift from the predictable revenue and the segmentation of roles and that type of thing back to a different model. And then how do we need to look at it from a sales standpoint in your career, right?

As an SDR, what should you be looking at? And this podcast is for those reps. I talk about 10, 60, 30, right? 10% of your A players, 60% of your B players, and 30% of your C players. The 60% in the B bucket here, the top 50% of that group who care, who want to evolve, right? Those are the ones that need to be paying attention to this, right? If you're on the bottom half of that 60% and you're just going through the motions and you're good enough, I don't really give a shit about you. If you're in the C group where you're just going through the motions and you suck and you don't care about getting better, like again, don't care. The people that care about this as a profession and your career in sales need to listen to this conversation and need to start thinking about things in a different manner.

So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. We had a blast on the conversation. Let me know what you think. And if you enjoyed this, please give us a review on iTunes or whatever it is. We're trying to boost up our viewers and all that other stuff. So if you do go on there, tell me what you think. Thank you. What's popping y'all? It's your man, James. Say What Sales Buckley. And this is your weekly Make It Happen Monday's episode with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to our partners, Sales Loft, Proposify, Gong, Vidyard, Chili Piper, and Salesforce Sales Cloud. Sales Loft, our original sponsor, is the premium cadence platform for all things outbound cadence to drive results. Customizable in every way and with APIs for your additional technology, Sales Loft's value is unrivaled in the sales community.

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Make no mistake, Salesforce Sales Cloud will be the last CRM that you ever have to buy. Learn more at salesforce.com and dive in. The water is fine. Good afternoon, everybody. It's John Barrows making up on Monday. Hopefully you had a fantastic weekend. I don't care about my weekend right now because I have one of my favorite people on this fucking podcast who I love talking to. He's a good friend of mine. We started as kind of business colleagues and fuck that because we're now cool and I love just hanging out with you. Doug Landis, what's going on, brother? Hey, man. What's up? What's up? I miss you and I miss Mondays, but thanks to you and your crew. I get a little flavor of you guys every week and all this great content you put out.

So I still feel connected. Appreciate it, man. You know what I didn't realize was as much as I hated being on the circuit after a while, like always on the plane and always going to these conferences and stuff, I realized it allowed me to be lazy with my relationships because I didn't have to think about like proactively reaching out to you, Doug, and saying, hey, man, we should catch up because I knew, you know, in a month or so I was going to see in San Francisco, we were going to do whatever. We're going to grab some drinks and fuck it. Right. So it's like, now I have to like consciously be like, holy shit. Wait a minute. I haven't talked to Doug in like fucking three months right now. Like we should, you know, what's up, man?

So part of this is catching up. Um, but yeah, that's, that's the part that I miss a little bit. I'm still not really excited to go back on site anywhere, but I do miss the circuit here a little bit to me, you know, it's a, I'm, I'm, I'm gone for the entire month of August. I'm starting to feel like the old days, but I'll tell you, I think what, what, what COVID has forced a lot of us to do is be much more intentional about our relationships. Right. So it's like, because I'm like you, I don't want to travel the same way. You and I were both traveling, which is basically going every other week, um, for throughout the entire year. But when I, when I travel, I'm much more intentional about the people that I want to see.

And I want to spend time with when I know I'm going somewhere versus like, oh, we'll just see each other, you know, dream force. We'll see each other at this event, that event. Uh, now it's more like, no, no, no, I'm, I'm going to be here and I want to hang out with you. And like, I was just telling you yesterday, I'm like, I'm going to be in Boston in September. We're hanging out. Like, absolutely. It's on my calendar. Right. So, well, and also, I think that's the same thing. And we'll, we're going to get into for people listening, this is Doug and I catching up, but we will get into some really, you know, meaty topics here. Cause I got some real cool things that are going on, but it's also, you know, if we back up a little bit with, um, you know, enterprise selling, right.

As far as like the customers and customers are getting used to this virtual world. And there's a lot of data that says they actually like this better, but it's not that the onsite in-person relationship is going away. It's just going to be much more intentional. Right. So it's like when, so instead of me just being like, oh, fuck it, let me just get on a plane and go meet my enterprise client so I can develop rapport. It's like, all right, let's do a bunch of remote stuff first. Then when it's onsite, it's real. You know what I mean? We have like, there's people involved, there's a strategy to it and it's valuable as opposed to just relationship development. That's a major shift that I'm seeing right now too.

Right. Right. Right. I know Dave Ruditsky, one of the most amazing enterprise leaders on the planet. He's got this playbook for doing big deals. I mean, he was enterprise sales and Salesforce, now Yext. And I mean, the guys are bad-ass. Uh, he is funny because one of his 10 plays in the playbook is get your face in the place, right? So get a, get a, get a, you know, get a key card, get a desk in their office, make sure to make them feel like you're almost an employee there, which I agree with, especially in the enterprise domain, but it's very different now because, well, first of all, we're not allowed to have guests in, you know, at our office at all. And so back to this original comment about being intentional, it's, you know, you're meeting to solidify the relationship.

You're meeting to close the deal. You're meeting because you've done all of the heavy lifting leading up to that conversation because reality is, is when you're meeting face-to-face right now, you're not meeting in their office. You're likely meeting at a restaurant over dinner. And so it's like, now it's kind of like, I just want to make sure that you're truthful. I want to look in your eyes and know that if we do this together, we're, we're in it together for the long haul. Yeah. And that's, and I like the word intentional. Cause I think that has, if there's one thing I hope people do come out of this with is, is the a who's important and what's really important to you. Right. And, and our, on our late, a lot less lazy with their important relationships than they were allowed to be.

Right. And that's kind of what dawned on me is like, I was lazy with a lot of my relationships. So, um, now I got to work at it, which is fine because I'm now I'm, it's way more quantity or quality over quantity. Right. Cause now it's like, instead of, Oh, fuck it. I'll just see everybody. And who cares? I'll take company. Like now it's like, no, no, no. I just want to see these three people when I, when I show up in town or something like that. So. Yeah. Interestingly enough, you can also parlay that into the world of sales, right? You've got this huge swath of potential prospects, right? You're like, I can reach out to possibly to everybody. I think it's actually, it behooves you, especially now because you can get in touch with somebody.

Well, let's just say the vehicle's a lot easier. It still takes it, you know, eight to 10 touches. It's still, you know, you still have to be intentional, relevant timing and all that. But at the end of the day, I think it's, it's, it's even more important for us to be hyper-focused on who we're going to target and why. Right. Similar to being intentional about who you're going to spend time with, like be really, really intentional about who you're targeting and why. If you want to elevate over marketing. Absolutely. Even marketing has to do that, but sales has to be even more relevant. So let's get the, the reason I wanted to reach out, obviously just otherwise to, to catch up is, is because of, of, um, where, where I'm now seeing things.

And I probably was like five or six years ago, I was a little bit of an alarmist with technology and what was happening. And I thought we were going to get there a lot faster than we did with artificial intelligence, doing a lot of the stuff that sales reps are doing. And after I saw the actual application of it, I wasn't as, you know, I didn't see any other macro trends that were going to really disrupt what were, what was happening significantly. It was going to be a slow burn. You know what I mean? As far as the replacements like that, COVID comes, punches us all square in the mouth, accelerates everything by like 10 years, pretty much. Okay. And one of the things I'm noting, and for those of you who don't know, Doug works over at Emergence Capital.

So they invest in, you know, a lot of companies in a lot in the AI space, right? Um, and there's obviously a lot to what he does and what Emergence does, but just to give everybody, go look at his fucking LinkedIn profile anyways. Um, but I'm noticing a shift in, in the, the PLG, the product led growth and where the money's going. So could you talk to us first about the trends you're seeing of where the money is going? Cause everybody always says, follow the money, right? If you ever want to figure out the root cause or the root problem or the root, whatever, follow the money and you'll probably figure it out. Right. By the way, side note, if your business is going sideways, if your win rates are down, if you're not converting as many opportunities, if you're losing to competitors, follow the money, meaning incentives drive behavior, right?

So what's your incentive structure and what behavior is that driving? That's one of the first, first questions I always ask when, when, you know, if numbers are off in one of our portfolio companies, I'm like, all right, who are, who are we paying what and to do what, right? What are we paying them to do and how is that actually turning out? Um, but you know, it's interesting if you think about what COVID did, uh, is, is it forced everybody online in this, in this online world now? And so now, because I don't have to travel, I don't have to go anywhere. I have more time to do research. I have more time to dig into products, solutions, capabilities, companies that might be able to help me. And so, you know, look, we've seen product led growth as, as a go-to-market motion kind of really proliferate over the last four or five years.

I came out and said this probably six months ago that I fundamentally believe that PLG is the most significant go-to-market motion from now for the next 10 to 15 years. Now, here's the thing. It's not going to eliminate sales and marketing led growth. It's going to become a hybrid domain because you need both. I mean, look, Slack started off as purely product, product led growth. And they brought in Fratty to run the sales organization. And they, because they realized in order to go up into the enterprise, in order to go do ELAs across the entire organization, you need, you need some people there to help. So product led growth. Good question on that. Cause I, this is more just me being curious of product led growth.

Cause I understand the product led growth would like a, and for those of you don't understand, like look up PLG, but it is literally get the product in the hands of the users, get them to use it. So that some people notice. It's an evolution of, it's an evolution of freemium. Whereas freemium used to be a very lightweight version of the product. Maybe just a couple of features and you're like, Ooh, that's cool. And they're like, no, buy now, buy now, buy now. Product led growth is screw the lightweight version. We're going to give you access to 80% of the product. Just get in there, use it, get, start getting value out of it because it, you know, it's, it's like, it's like deeper crack, if you will.

It's like you get really locked into it. You're like, well, can't get rid of this now. I mean, Slack, like Slack is like, once Slack is in there, you're never ripping it out. Like you're never ripping it out. Right. You'll have people revolt against it. So just be, so I think PLG is for a major part of the market, but educate me here on enterprise, like complex enterprise selling is, is PLG even relevant up at that level? Cause I can't, as a user, I can't get that big. Right. So let's just frame this a little bit as far as. Well, but here's a, here's the funny thing though. Right. So if you look at you're an SAP, you're an Oracle, even you're a Salesforce, guess what? You have to figure out ways to get people into your product.

Don't give me this excuse of like, Oh, my product's too big and it's complex and it requires all this. Well, guess what? You're going to get disrupted because someone's going to come in from Y Combinator, smarter, faster, more nimble, nimble, better technology. And they're going to come in from the bottoms up and disrupt, disrupt your world. And so then of course they're going to go buy them and it's cool. Well, no, they got a PLG motion. So what's happening in, so there's, there's two schools right now, right? There's this schools of like new companies that are evolving that are really PLG driven. So get the product right away, start to start to experience full value and then grow and expand from there.

And then there's the enterprises right now that have technology that are looking for ways in which to get people into their product quickly. So they can start to understand the real value of the product. So they're kind of coming down from a product perspective and these new entrants are coming up from a product perspective to push up into the enterprise. That's really what's happening. So PLG is here. Yeah. Whether people like it or not. Right. And so then this is what I want people to pay attention to right now. We had had this conversation and everybody, you know, I'm going to be very clear on this to people listening to this podcast. And if you, if you know me, you know, this is my approach.

10, 60, 30, there's 10% of the top reps out there that are always going to be the top reps that are your A players. There's the 60% B players. And then there's a 30% C players. And those people suck the 60%. There's about a 50, 50 split in a lot of cases, 50% who are good enough to be B players, but just want to kind of coast by and do their thing. And then there's the 50% of the B players that want to be a players. Those are the people I give a shit about. So if you're listening right now and you're the bottom hand of that 60, fuck off. If you're in the 30%, fuck off. If you're in the top end of that 60%, what we're trying to do here is give you things to think about so that as this technology comes over, as, you know, artificial intelligence takes over more and more, you are prepared to get to that next level.

So let's talk about those reps right now, as far as this PLG happening with the artificial intelligence, what is that doing to the model? And, and I'm going to pick on predictable revenue right now. You and I both are very, very acutely aware of predictable revenue and, and, and let's not name any names here, but of, of look, that kind of was the, the, the Bible, if you will, of Salesforce. And for those who don't know, predictable revenue, look it up. Uh, it's all just about the segmentation of roles. It's why we have SDRs, BDRs, AEs, and CSMs, right? It used to be before that one sales rep would literally do everything. Now we're segmentation roles. I've always said, even when it was first out that it's a great model for sales organizations to scale, you bring in cheap labor, you beat the shit out of them, you groom them, you put them into AE and you move over.

Uh, and then they, you know, and, and, and usually there's the S you know, SDR and then they move to AE, but SMB. So they closing small deals and then they move up to mid market. Then they move it to enterprise. The problem is, is that most organizations are not big enough to segment SMB mid market and enterprise. So SDRs are just jumping to AEs and probably have to carry mid market enterprise type stuff and really don't have the skills to do it. And then we have CSMs or customer success just kind of out there on the side, like by themselves, which is why that relationship is always fractured when an AE closes a deal and it flips it over to CS. They almost have to requalify it at this point because they don't even know what the client bought and the client doesn't know what the fuck they bought.

So what are you seeing right now? The shift to the model itself? Um, and, and cause I think it's broken right now. I love this topic. If you have not. Yeah. Yeah. If you know me, you know, I love this topic. That's why I had you on this one. Cause I need to be enlightened here. Cause I, cause I'm worried. Well, it's, it's, it's smart to be worried if you're out there right now, if you're an SDR or if you have SDRs, if you're Lars Nielsen, you've got, you know, 5,000 SDRs were rolling up to you, guess what? You need to be thinking about this stuff. Here's the reality. So by the way, predictable revenue did not start at Salesforce. Sorry to the creator of it. It started at Oracle, you know, way back in the day.

Cause that's when we actually built the machine at SDRs, BDRs, you know, moving all the way up by the way. So that's where it started. And then Mark Benioff left Oracle, created Salesforce and took that model with him. Nice work, Mark. Uh, so all credit goes, kind of goes to Larry. The other thing is though, what you're talking about is the, the segmented functions of SDR, BDR, you know, SMBAE mid-market, uh, you know, commercial mid-market enterprise. That's a sales and marketing led growth motion. That's a model that's driven by sales and marketing, right? Because marketing is creating campaigns. They're doing brand awareness. They're doing webinars. That's creating contacts. Marketing doesn't create leads.

We'll talk about that in a second, but they're creating contacts. SDR then takes those contacts calls and like, Hey, are you interested? They go through this shitty qualification process, which we'll talk about that in a second. And then it gets passed along, right? So you spend your time, you spend your time, you know, doing one specific job and then hopefully earn you the right to do the next one, to do the next one, to do the next one. Unfortunately, most organizations don't do enough to actually develop the people at their, their, their reps is, they're going from SDR to BDR, BDR to closing. Now it's like, Oh, we didn't teach you how to close or negotiate. Yeah. So, so they're going to end up in that kind of, maybe that 50% or below, uh, range.

Um, so that's like, that's the traditional model, but now you introduce this idea of product-led growth. So if someone gets in the product right away and guess what? I don't need to talk to an SDR. And in fact, an SDR shouldn't be calling that, that person or that organization. So it changes the model altogether. So fundamentally, I believe, as I said before, that we're going to live in this hybrid domain. There's going to be product-led growth as a top of the funnel mechanism, along with marketing-led growth and sales-led growth. You're never going to get away from all of those because you need them all. But what, how does that change functions and roles in an organization? Well, I see a couple of things.

So to follow up on marketing campaigns, you'll likely still need the traditional kind of SDR, if you will. Uh, right. And of course you're going to likely still need BDRs to do some outbound prospecting to very key targeted accounts, account-based marketing, account-based sales still matters. By the way, it mattered 40 years ago, way back in the day when we called it strategic selling. So before there was an acronym for it, right. Totally put a different label on it. It's still there and it's still going to be there. Here's what's different. You now have to rethink about, well, so what do we do with those customers that get involved in the product right away? How do we, instead of our marketing campaigns, directing them to a web form that says, you know, I want more information or contact me form.

It's no, no. Marketing is now pushing them into the product. Everything's going to push them in the product. So the moment someone gets in the product, now what you need to look for the signals that demonstrate that they're in and they're interested and they're actually actively using it. So now we're looking at usage data. So the first time, so the two things really matter. Number one, the signals to be really clear about the signals of what people are doing in the product and when should you engage with them? And then the second question is, well, who's engaging? And I would argue that the role of the SDR, so there's no longer going to be as many traditional SDRs or as many traditional BDRs.

I think the function shifts to more of a product specialist. Now you could argue that could be a customer success manager that moves into this role. It could be an SDR that moves in this role, but they need to be more technically versed in the product itself. And the motion isn't about, you know, the motion isn't about like trying to qualify them. The motion is trying to add value. Let me show you how you can get more value out of this. Like John, I know you have a Tesla. It's like when you first buy a Tesla and I'm not a Tesla buyer or user, but when you first buy it, there's so much shit you could do with that car. You're like, uh, I just need to know how to turn it on. I literally need to know how to turn it on.

And I need to know how to like drive the damn thing. And unlock this sucker. Like literally like, cause it's a fuck. You're just like, all right. Uh, I mean, I can't tell you how many times where I was like in the car and I'm like, when I first bought it, I'm like, is this, do I shut it off? Like, I don't even know what's happening. Like if I walk away from this car, is it going to drive away on me? Like, I don't fucking know. So, so here's the thing. So, so if you think that, that we, if we, if our job is to get them in the product and then our job is to help them get more value out of the product. And once they demonstrate certain signals, then we can pass it on VAE. Then the AE then takes it.

So guess what? Two things are happening. Number one, that early qualification process that SDRs traditionally do that changes dramatically. So the conversation is very, very different. Um, their level of technology knowledge is very different. And then of course, and, and the AE now no longer has to do a demo that doesn't have to be your, that's not your crush anymore. Cause they're already in the product. Now it doesn't mean you're not going to have to do demos as you're trying to scale their usage across the organization. Right? So, you know, that's kind of the wedge in or the first early adopters in the, in the organization, but it's, it's beyond that. That's when the AE takes over. Now, one of the things you said before that you and I talked about years ago is where's automation going to disrupt some of this.

I believe those, those kind of more traditional SDRs are also at risk of being disrupted. You shared, you shared a product with me called Tavis or something. Yeah. It was T A actually. Yeah. T A V U S. Yeah. So, and they do, they're like automated videos. Deep fake video. Like I can deep fake videos. Awesome. So you got deep fake videos. You can do deep fake text, right? In outreach. The, the, the analogy I use when you're reaching out to somebody. And so like, now all of a sudden the role of the SDR changes dramatically. We don't need as many. We don't need you to do as much stuff because there's technology that can augment a lot of that. Well, I mean, the analogy I'm using on that one is, you know, you could like it, it's our, the technology is already there where you, Doug Landis can get a personalized invite to dream force from Mark Benioff.

And when you open up the video, it says, Hey, Doug, really appreciate your support of our Salesforce over the years. We got a dream force coming up. I'd like you to come. You know what I mean? And all of a sudden it's like, what the fuck? Mark Benioff just sent me a personal, and it's not personalized, but there's somebody in the back just feeding words into a deep fake Mark Benioff face. Who's just saying, Hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So now talk about one to many. Right. So with that, I mean, the, one of the reasons I reached out to, I actually texted you and then you called me, uh, I think I texted you on, on Wednesday or something like that. And then you called me on Monday and I was stoned.

And so I was like, I forgot why I had texted you. And then, and then you reminded me because I was like, Oh my God, I'm like, this is why, because I sat in an executive round table. Okay. And, and I've been worried about this SDR thing and, and putting them in a position to be successful moving forward. But I don't, I don't know what the model should look like to do that. Right. And what Tim O'Neill over at, uh, the CRO over at, let me just make sure I got this right. Cause I want to give him full credit for this elation, A L A T I O N. Um, Tim O'Neill, he's a CRO. He talked about how his model is instead of doing the traditional SDR to BDR to AE, right. And then CSMs and AMs are over there.

He says, no, we do SDRs first, right? Yep. They go out there and they make their calls to some strategic accounts, try to get meetings and those type of things. But then instead of promoting them to an AE, he actually flips them over to an AM. So an account manager. And what they do is they're responsible now for renewals. So it's a sale, right? Uh, cross sells, upsells sale, but it's a, it's a less stressful sale cause it's already a client that knows you it's. And so you're reaching out to people who know you and you're looking for reasons. So you're still selling, but what you're also doing is you're learning the product. You're learning how the client uses the product and the solution and that type of stuff.

So you get a much deeper understanding of the value that it brings. Right. And I forget, I'm going to bring him on a podcast just so I can flush this out a little bit more about how he structured it. But my gut says, you know, you leave them in that position for two years minimum, cause you don't want customers churning through people, whatever. Right. So you leave them in there for two years. Now, at the end of those two years, those reps can stay in customer success or account management if they want to, or now they can move to be an AE full cycle sales. Cause now they know everything. And to me, that was like, like the fucking light bulb went off in my head and I'm like, holy shit for a huge portion of clients right now who are doing the traditional predictable revenue model with PLG coming.

This could be a very simple, but very drastic switch to the growth model here. And I, and I'm all over this. I think this is fucking brilliant. Yeah. So, and, and it makes perfect, it makes perfect sense. If you also believe that still PLG is the go-to-market motion that's, that is the go-to-market motion of the future. So your first interaction with a, with a prospect or yeah, with a prospect, whether that's an SDR or not, whatever you call them, it doesn't matter, but that's an easy because they're going to, they need to understand the product even more. They need to understand how to engage, how to share, how to get more value on the product. And then to transition from that to an account manager role to an AE role, you're, you're now much more well versed and you know how to prospect because you're still going to have to likely do some kind of outbound prospecting to key targeted accounts, but you're also going to be engaging unless you split the role, but you're also going to be engaging with people in the product itself.

Then you get more product knowledge as an account manager. You can learn the skills of closing, of negotiating, of relationship building, and then you parlay that over to it, over to an AE. I mean, it makes, makes perfect sense. There's no reason not to. So going back to your original comment, what's the model of the future? It's very different than what it has been in the last five, 10 years. Very different. And it goes back to the customer centric. I mean, I think there's that stat that corporate executive port put out there, which I always find fascinating that like 50, 53% of the client's decision is based off of the sales experience. Forget about the products, forget about the value. Literally more than half of the reason that they buy is because the experience they have through the sales process and the experience, and I'm, and I'm a huge Dave Cancel fan over at Drift.

Right. And he talks about how everything has been commoditized except for the experience. Yep. The experience is what matters, right? Yep. I mean, you know, So it's interesting as, as investors though, you know, we, it's really hard. Like, oh, we, we deliver a better experience. We've got the same product, but we just deliver a better experience. So like, uh, okay. Um, how do, how do we codify that? How do we, how do we, how do we evaluate that? By the way, you know how we evaluate that customer love usage, Dow over mouth, daily active users over monthly active users. You're like, how much is actually up into the right net dollar retention churn. We look at all of those things as indicators that, wow, people really love this product and they're not, they're not going away.

And oh yeah, it's converting. It's expanding. It's upselling. It's, it's the renewing at a, at a faster clip. Those are all the indicators of experience, delivering a better experience in our mind. Can I ask you, how does that balance with, and what's always frustrated me, and I don't know how we get out of this is, is, is the VC money and the pressure to grow fast. So there's always like, to me, I got, you know, I got so many people giving me shit for the Salesforce article that I was part of. Cause it, cause it was like, I said, look, I, you know, it's a monthly commissions are going away, you know, all that other stuff. And I, I didn't, you know, they, they kind of misquoted me on this. Cause they said, I reached out to you too.

And you know, they missed, they, they, they took half my quote for the article. They said, Oh, you know, John Barrow's professor, the quotas should go away completely. That no, what I, what I said was monthly quotas should go away because I don't think it's a bad, it, it, you know, going back to incentive programs and incentivize what you want to, you know, have happen. Well, if it's a monthly thing, then I don't give a fuck about long-term shit at all. I'm trying to hit my number this month, Doug, I'm going to give you a 30% discount so that you can get, you close this month and I'm going to fracture the relationship. I don't care about right now. So how do you balance that now? Comp plans, incentive structures to focus on quality while the massive pressure from VCs and, and, and IPOs and the, you know what I mean?

To, to grow as fast as you possibly can. Is there, is there a balance on that? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a question that I think is going to take us a couple more years to really flesh out. Um, because, because we're, because we're shifting, right. Um, you know, this wedge product-led growth wedge, which largely isn't really that new, but it's, it's forcing us to kind of shift ways in which we go to market and the ways in which we integrate important word, marketing sales and customer success. I don't fucking believe in alignment. That's stupid. It's alignment. Alignment basically just means, John, I know what you're doing. This is what I'm doing. See you later. Integration means, guess what?

We all care about one thing and that's the number. And in order to get to the number, we got to care about our customers and that's integration. So it's like, and marketing I'm comped on revenue and CS I'm comped on revenue and sales. I'm comped on revenue as a part of my overall incentive structure and remember incentive stride behavior. All right, y'all. Doug Landis and John go back like Cadillac seats and you can tell that they have these types of conversations on the regular. John goes pretty hard at his views on where the sales model is headed. SDRs, AEs, customer success. Where's it all going? Product-led growth. These are the types of conversations that I love because it kind of forces us to think for ourselves and how we lead from a growth mentality's perspective.

I'm really enjoying the banter and the relevance to growth that this back and forth with JB and Doug is providing. Send me your thoughts on this because I want to hear from you. This is how we create content that matters to the leaders and the front lines that are most impacted by our sales techniques and tactics. So we want to hear from you on what your thoughts are on where we're headed as a model. Reach out to me directly at james at jbarrows.com and tell me what you think. I'd love to hear what you'd like to hear more about. I'll shout you out on the next Make It Happen Mondays. And today we're giving a big shout out to Arianne Craig of Lucidworks. She recently became Driving to Close certified by completing the course with John Barrows.

As a JB sales member, Arianne has access to all of our training, skills, tips, webinar replays, sales techniques, shows, and podcasts. Join us and gain access today and become a member yourself at ondemand.jbarrows.com. We'll see you there. Let's throw it back to JB and Doug. So, you know, I think there's two ways to look at it. Number one, if you're a high growth company and there's a huge market and we know there's competitors in this space, of course, we're going to push you because it's a land grab. So go fast. And that's the insanity of an early stage company because it's like right now, whoever can grab the market, put a stake in the ground and say, this is what this is all about. I'm going to use Gong, of course, as an example.

Gong came out and said, this is what conversational intelligence is about. Their products sucked, but they spent all their money on marketing. And guess what? They were the leaders and they're now worth $7 billion. We sold course for $600 million, right? So big difference. Of course, the product was better. They invested all their money in the product, but they were slower to market. Interestingly enough, so we're going to, as investors, we're going to push you to the market faster. But guess what? You know how you can do that faster? Get them in the product faster. So product-led growth motion actually allows you to support that accelerated model because then you can convert at a higher clip, right?

Rather than, okay, where's my list of people? Go hire my 25 SDRs, go pound the phones and turn this flywheel of a monthly cadence. Turn that on. Now, we still believe that there's value in the monthly cadence depending on the price point and the product. So there's elements there, right? If it's transactional and it's kind of SMB style. Yeah. If it's a $5,000 product, well, that's what you're going to have. You're going to have a machine. But fundamentally, what we try and do is the early days, you're trying to land some of those early customers. They're going to be smaller deals and then you're going to move your way up into the enterprise. But do you have to actually build the same machine as before?

No. You introduce product lead growth, that accelerates the model, off you go. I also believe, and again, we've been talking about this for a long time, the shift to a much more account-based focus. So the challenge, I think the biggest challenge that companies have is when they're like horizontally SaaS solutions. You can sell it to everybody, like the boxes of the world. Everybody can be a user. That is really hard. And if that's your product, then unfortunately, you're probably going to have this PLG motion, a huge SDR team, and the traditional kind of sales segmentation. What's happening more and more though, is people are being much more focused about who their audience is, being much more calculated in who they're targeting.

And that takes more time. So go back to your comment about let's move away from the monthly quotas. Let's move away from this monthly commission. Well, if you're going to be much more targeted, more of an ABM approach, right? Take ABM plus product lead sales, those two things together, you can actually still accelerate quickly, but well, well, almost feel like you're, you're being more selective. And that's interesting because this is also like, how does that jive with this to the platform versus the specialist? So example, um, you get all these kinds of specialized products is kind of the strategy there that you're a specialized product. So you can go deep in one very good thing and then get acquired by one of the bigger ones.

Is that ultimately the strategy there? Because I look at Gong, for instance, Gong's a good example. They, they kind of came out just pure phone conversational intelligence. Now they're trying to broaden their platform with sales loft. Another example, right? Sales loft was first a cadence tool. And now they're saying, actually stop, stop working in Salesforce. We want you to work at sales loft. And what they do end up is, you know, and this is any company Salesforce does this and you know better than most is they'll buy a product. They'll, they'll usually kind of create something for free to disrupt whoever the bigger incumbents are. And then they'll go buy that specialized product. And that specialized product they usually buy is like 70% is good or they'll create like 70% as good as the market leader.

So it's good enough, but it's on my platform. So when I try to sell you and I'm looking at sales loft and I'm like, I got conversational intelligence here in sales loft and it's kind of good enough. Or I can go to gong and double up my spend here. Fuck it. I'm staying with sales loft because so how do you marry that, that idea of specialization or is it, you don't marry it, you just do specialization. Then you get, then the goal is to get acquired by a platform. Well, first of all, it kind of depends on what your, what your exit strategy is for your company at the end of the day. Right. So, you know, some people are just building a tool to be a tool. Uh, and they know, they, they know their, they know their TAM for selling this tool.

Uh, and they know eventually their outcome is to get acquired. Like that's the, that's, that makes the most sense. Right. And look, to be honest, I was going to ask real quick, do you, I've always said like to founders, like don't ever start a company with the mindset of selling it, start a company because you're solving a fucking problem. But as an investor, do you, I mean, how much does exit strategy, obviously, cause you're looking to get your money back here. How much, how does that jive with you? Like when you look at somebody, it's like, oh, in two years, I'm going to get this point where it's going to be X and it's going to be that. And that's what I want to get the fuck out of here. Versus somebody who's like, I started this for a passion and there's a problem here that I'm trying to fix.

Yeah. Well, so, okay. So now, now we're talking about investment philosophy, right? So as investors, well, I'll come back to this, but as investors, our investment philosophy is we want to invest in people that want to build iconic standalone software companies, Salesforce, Viva, Box, Yammer, steel brick, success factors. We don't invest in companies that we think that there's an acquisition possibility within the next three or four years. We look at companies as like, over the next 10 years, can this be an iconic standalone software company? And that's one of the challenges. If you're just a tool, then we don't see you as being an iconic standalone software company. So in essence, you kind of need to be a tool in order to become a platform in order to become an iconic standalone software company.

Now, there are a lot of other investors out there that will invest in you knowing that you'll get acquired for two, $300 million. They'll make it, you know, a handful of millions of dollars and off you go. Yay. Or private equity that'll roll you up and smash it together. I mean, but there's plenty of tier two investment firms that that's a great strategy. I'm going to invest because I see there's going to be an exit here in the next three to four years. And, you know, I'll make, you know, three, four X multiple of my money. That's awesome. We want to make 20 X our money like Zoom. So, but that's our, but that's just, that's an investment philosophy. Right. And so, you know, we pick and choose companies where we think there's a broader application beyond just being a tool itself.

Now that tool can be a wedge. If you look at Diva, their wedge was, we're going to build CRM for pharmaceutical sales reps or 400,000 of them. And that was it. It was like, what? That's crazy. It's a tiny little market. What they figured was we're doing this in very specific, it's very specific customer base. Once we get that wedge, we can start layering the cake, adding products on top and take that, you know, $50,000 customer and turn them into a $5 million customer, which is what they've done, which is why they're now worth $30 billion. Right. So that's, that's industry focused solution. You can be a tool so long as that's your wedge and you can layer the cake. If you're a horizontal oriented solution as a tool, well, let's look at Gong as an example, then you have to figure out, well, how do I expand and become more of a platform?

Because that's my only real value, real value. Otherwise we're just going to get acquired. And that's honestly, that's what, I mean, Gong is trying to replace Salesforce. Outreach is trying to replace Salesforce. Sales Loft in essence is trying to replace Salesforce. Although I'd say they're the least aggressive about it. That's why Gong and Outreach raise ridiculous amounts of money. And that's their only play is to do that, to go public and to try and become kind of next evolution of CRM. It's pretty wild. I know we're kind of getting off topic from our domain of SDRs and this whole, these new go-to-market motions, but it's important. It's important to think about it because, you know, as a buyer, when you're making that decision, to your point earlier, Sales Lofts, their conversation intelligence product is 70% of the way there.

Awesome. It's good enough. And it's integrated. Yep. And your value proposition changes. And that's why I come back to, you know, that upper end of the 60% who wants to get better and what they should be paying attention to and how they see and how we're seeing the markets shift right now and where to go if you're looking for your career, for instance. You know what I mean? Like if you were, if you were starting off right now as an SDR and you were looking at the landscape, knowing what you know now, where would you actually, where would you look to build your career at? Would you look to build it at a point solution that's, you know, I mean, I know it's a broad question, but like if you had, if you had your choice right now and you were a 22 year old kid and you could go work for whoever, knowing now what you know, like, and obviously, you know, try to get equity and whatever you can, so you can make a pop before you fucking turn on like old men, like Doug and I.

But, but it's, but it's, but it's a, a, uh, an employee's market right now. Right. You can, I mean, hiring is so freaking hard right now. So, uh, yeah, I'm trying to like, is it a seller's market, a buyer's market? It's an employee's, if you're an employee, individual contributor in the world of sales, you can go anywhere, you can do whatever you want. So I think it's important to think about the exit strategy of that company. And is there viability in this company that you're interested right now to get acquired? If so, by whom? That's an important question to ask yourself because look, Craig, Craig Rosenberg posted this amazing, um, uh, uh, these, these amazing insights last week. I reposted on my LinkedIn yesterday about alpha platforms and you could argue Oracle was the original alpha platform.

They bought companies for margin, right? They would, they bought PeopleSoft, they bought Siebel, they bought, bought, bought, bought, right now Salesforce, then Salesforce became the next evolution of an alpha platform. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, build, build, build. Now you've got companies like ZoomInfo. That's becoming a new alpha platform. That's buying these individual players, kind of hook them all up. Calidus Cloud was another example of this that bought all these companies and tried to glue them all together. The hard part is getting them all to work together. That's, you know, cause, but fortunately with this new, with new web language today, uh, you can use Apex or Heroku, what have you to, to get things to work better, faster.

So I would think about like, is this just a company that's that, that is just a tool and do they have a longer term strategy to become the platform? And if they're not going to become a platform, who could potentially acquire them? And if they are a potential acquisition, now we'll want to look at, well, what are the hot markets? So for example, going back to the world of, excuse me, going back to the world of product-led growth, there are about five companies right now that we're tracking in this domain because in order to get real value out of product-led growth, you need to understand the signals of what the buyer is actually doing in the product, right? So when, when, when I was a box in the old days, one of the things we knew is if you're a seller and you downloaded it, you know, got a free version of box.

If you didn't upload a file and share that with someone else within the first seven days, you were gone. You were going to churn 98% churn rate. So we knew within seven days, if you're a salesperson at a targeted company that we're going after, I'm calling you if it's day three, because I want to make sure that you use the product because otherwise you're going to churn and now I've gotten a wedge in. So there are companies right now, POCUS, correlated, variants. There's a handful of others that we're all looking right now. They're like super like pre-product or products just about to be released. But what they do is they ingest all of your product data along with your CRM data, along with your like email data and basically tell you, here's what's going on in the product.

Here are the people you should be calling right now because they're demonstrating the right signals that they're interested and they're engaged. So if I'm an SDR, I'm going to go there because guess what? Product-led growth is like the next big thing in the go-to-market space. So that to me seems interesting. They'll likely get sucked up and acquired maybe by a larger analytics company, a Looker or Amplitude or something like that because it makes a ton of sense. That's kind of point solution. And then I'm always going to ask myself, well, what can I personally do to get better so that I can rent my ticket anywhere? That's the other piece, right? So on the one hand, it's looking at the industry, the technology and the company and what their potential exit strategy is.

And SDRs, don't be afraid to ask that question in your interviews. Like, what's your exit strategy? Where do you want to go? Like, what do you want to do? Who do you think could potentially acquire you and why? And, you know, why do you think you're going to continue to be number one in this space given the fact that there's six new competitors coming out? So I think there's a lot of great questions you can ask that are often not asked. I was going to say, like, I think a lot of people are, and I think also founders are not as transparent as they should be when it comes to that type of stuff. As far as the organization, I always tell founders and executives who, you know, are telling me like, oh, you know, how do I get my team to believe in this is in work as hard as I do?

First of all, stop that. They're not getting paid like you. So don't ask them to do that type of shit and don't expect that from them. But also you can never get something. You can never, I always say you can't get people to do something more than their job unless they believe in a bigger picture vision, right? Unless they believe in something bigger than what their job is then. But if they believe in that vision, man, you can get people to do a whole bunch of shit. So for that founder out there, you know, who does have an exit strategy, who came in to talk to Doug Landis and said, yes, in three years, our goal is here to be acquired at this level and boom, right? And I know you probably wouldn't invest in them because you look for the individual one, but for that, like that leader should absolutely be sharing that with the organization, right?

Well, okay. So, cause I, cause there's a danger there of like, well, I don't want people to think that, you know, three, I don't want to misset expectations. I don't want to tell them too much here. So I should just tell them we're a normal company that's doing our thing. So how do you balance that as a leader of, of like how much transparency is there so that your team can be bought in versus like freaked out that they only got a job for the next three years or something like that? I mean, look, everyone needs a purpose. Everyone needs a sense of purpose, which that's why we get up in the morning and we go to work. If you go to a company and you don't feel like they've got a great sense of purpose or, and they have an understanding of what's possible and where they're potentially going, then what are you doing there?

That becomes just a job. We're just going to get a paycheck. Um, and again, that may be your thing, which is fine. That may be what you need in your life right now, which is totally fine. But you know, for me entering this job force right now, I'm like, we, who's got the best purpose, like sales lot, their purpose is like to create a better buying experience to make buyers love their sellers. Like that's the sense of purpose. And people love going to work there and they'll stay there for six, seven years. Right. Versus, you know, yours is like, Oh, we're a tool and we're buying other tools. And like, we think there's something here, but we're likely just going to get acquired. It's like, what, what are you doing?

Um, so I don't know. I mean, look, as a, as a founder, you may not know what the exit strategy is and that's fine, but know that there's, there's a, there, there we're doing this for a reason, you know, under, be really clear about the, why, why did you start the company? Why do you want people to work for you? Why do you want people to stay? Why should people buy into you and the company? Super important. Even as an SDR, you should be asking those questions. I was going to say as an SDR. And I think right now, going back to buyer, seller, marketplace, right. The going, and also what I hope reps, you know, when we talked about being intentional, uh, with your outreach now and intentional with your relationships, I think you should also be intentional with a self-assessment of your why and your values and everything else about like really understanding, forget about work here for a second.

Like, like what's your lifestyle want to look like? Like paint that picture for yourself and then let's back into it. So you know what you're working towards and look, that can always change. You know what I mean? It doesn't have to be that route, you know, singular place. You should always be open for opportunities. I mean, you and I are both testaments to that. It's like, Oh fuck squirrel. Okay. You know, let me go over there because that makes more sense. But, but if you don't have purpose, you know, like my, I'll give you an example. Like my mom, you know, my dad passed recently. My mom's now, she's always searched for purpose and, you know, she's 70, uh, shit, 73 right now, 74. No, 77. Um, and she's now like, and she moved in with my sister out in California and you know, a little just, you know, moving in with your mom type of thing, like family tension, right?

And I told my sister, I'm like, just hold on a second. I go, just let mom go through this transition. Obviously as soon as she finds purpose, everything will be fine. And she did, you know what I mean? And now she's like, ah, now I got something to hold onto. I got purpose. I got something to wake up for every morning. Right. And if you don't have that right now, if you're just like droning, getting up and fucking putting on, you know, just a nice shirt, but keeping your sweatpants on, because you got to make sure that you look good on zoom before you make the phone call to your boss, who's going to have a one-on-one that just suck. And you hate like, okay, man, life is too short right now to be going through those motions at this point.

That's why I agree. The world is now flat. You can now go get a job anywhere in any company that's just trying to get local, whatever. Like I think it's a moron because the talent pool now is all across the globe. Yeah. Totally. You just got to go find people from anywhere. Um, however, I'm going to, there's one little caveat to what John just said. Uh, I, I wholeheartedly agree. However, don't also use that as an excuse for you to jump around and bounce around and chase the next hot thing. Because I'll tell you what, as someone that it's constantly looking for talent for our portfolio companies. One of the first things I look at is how long are you staying in your role? Are you promoting, getting promoted up in your, in your function over time?

Cause to me, staying power loyalty also means that you understand that the purpose of the organization, you're also investing in yourself and you're not just looking for the next big, quick hit. Um, that's just, that's a huge, huge no, no. So don't use that. Like, Oh, I'm not sure what my purpose is to bounce around to a bunch of different companies and trying to test the waters. Stay, stay, stick with it. Cause guess what? Every job sucks at a point and in points in time, every job, I don't care what your job is. You're like, Oh, I gotta do this. Yeah. It sucks. We've all eaten shit. I, you know, I always say, I'm like, you know, we all do. We still do. Exactly. I still fucking, like the other day, like I still have to do it.

I still have to do annual reviews and annual reviews suck. I'm doing mailers. Come on. I'm still doing mailers to my fucking, you know what I like? My team, like we did this, we did this, you know, giveaway for father's day when the book that we have. Right. And everybody had to nominate like a good dad or something like that. And 50 of them. So we gave away 50 books. So I, and my team, my marketing team and everything else, young kids who don't know me, like Chris knows me obviously, and that type of stuff. But we had a bunch of kids. I was like, all right, yeah, just give me the names. I'll, you know, put them on the address. I'll, I'll autograph each one of them and I'll mail them out myself.

And like, these kids were like, wait a minute, what? Like you're, you're going to put the addresses on and you're going to autograph them. You don't want us to. I go, what the fuck? I'm like, they're in my house. Like I would have to ship them to you. And then you would have to, you know what I mean? Like, I'll just fucking get stoned on a Sunday night and scribble a bunch of shit on a piece and put them in like, what the fuck? So we all eat shit. The question is, is, is that shit helping you get to the next level of your career? And you know, and your point is extremely valid one. I actually think that following your passion is one of the dumbest pieces of advice is I'd ever heard somebody give, especially to a kid coming out of college, like follow your fucking passion.

If you told me, follow my passion coming out of college, I'd be a stoner painting on the sidewalk somewhere in fucking San Francisco. You know what I mean? But what it is, is find it, find it and use your twenties to find it and then go all in on it. But your twenties, try, like try some shit, go, but stay a long enough to realize it's not the company. It's you maybe in your perception of things. And you just got to grind through it and suck it up. And I don't want to say suck it up. Cause I know mental health is a real big thing here these days. And it's not just like the, Oh, fuck you just work hard. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Right. I want to make sure. Don't do it at the cost of your own mental health for sure.

Don't do anything at the cost of your own mental health. But I mean, to your point, even, you know, let's say as you're trying to determine what you're passionate about, you're trying to kind of understand what your purpose is in life. You also focus on developing your skill sets, right? So, so I'm going to take this all the way back to the very beginning of our conversation where we're talking about SDRs and the evolution of the SDR, the evolution of kind of the go-to-market motion right now with PLG introducing, you know, a new way to engage and technology that's creating automation for the SDRs. Oh my gosh, what's going to happen to the SDRs? And they're all going to go away. They are going away.

They are changing, no question. But I also think it's an opportunity for you to elevate your skill set and get away from, I think we've done a disservice to the SDRs is putting them in this box and saying, your job is to qualify, fall, ban, anime, whatever the fuck it is. And which they all suck. And I don't agree with, and then that's your job. And it's no wonder why they hate it after three months. They're like, this sucks, you know, because it's just like the same shit. So if you can, if you can focus on developing them and elevating their skill sets and believe in their ability to have deeper, more business-oriented conversations with customers, well, guess what? You can change their domain.

You can change how they, how they experience their job and also get them up into a closing job a hell of a lot faster. So, which is, of course, as an SDR or BDR, that's what you want anyway, because the grind itself sucks, which we all have to do. We've got to earn our stripes. I get it. But, but there's more that you can do to invest in yourself. Well, and I think this also just aligns directly with, I mean, all of this, like product-led growth, whatever, top down, bottom up, right? This bottom up approach to selling, which is product-led growth, but even regardless of product-led growth, I can sit down and as an SDR, I beg C-level executives or CROs or VPs of sales to stop making everything an SDR does based on like high quality meetings with high quality.

No, what C-fucking-level executive wants to talk to a 22-year-old pissy kid, went behind the ears who's going to ask them band questions. It's, they don't want to have those. And COVID exasperated that because COVID was like not a shot in hell. So why not leverage these kids the way that they should be leveraged? They're great at data, you know, analysis, not analysis, but their collection. They're great at, you know, you know, qualifying, asking questions, right? We give them those skills. Unleash them on the individuals within the organization, the frontline people who are potentially using it. Ask, get those meetings. A, they're easier to get, B, they're easier conversations to have. And then, but, but focus them on collecting information, kind of like what you had said before with those companies that you're investing in about how they're looking at all the data and saying, Hey, there's signals here.

Well, as an SDR, I can call into individual frontline people and asking, and then all of a sudden pick up on signals and then give that to my AE to say, Hey, go call the CEO. And now the CEO can say, Hey, we've been talking to 15, 20, 30 of your employees. And they're telling us that these are the real challenges that they're having. We should have a conversation because our solution aligns with that. Now you give an SDR something to hold onto. You give them good conversations that they can be more business. They don't have to qualify every fucking one of them that they have to get on a phone with. Right. And now they're giving valuable insights to the organization that they can make better information, make better decisions with.

It's, it's what Jordan was saying last week, and you're making it happen Mondays, right? The webinar that you guys did on selling it, selling to the enterprise, right? Which is like, you're looking for commercial insight. Well, is it as an AE calling on a huge enterprise account? That's a ton of time and effort to go look for commercial insights. So why can't I partner with an SDR or BDR to help me do that? I also think the other thing is, I think we have an opportunity to teach the SDRs on like what real business acumen means. Like how do you determine what, what are the strategic initiatives for the business? So they focus on growing revenue or they focus on mitigating risk, cutting costs.

Why is that the case? How can you assess that in a matter of seconds? How can you build a hypothesis about their business? So when you come to the conversation, you've got an, you're demonstrating empathy, connection and credibility. And those three things an SDR could do not just like, Hey, tell me about do you have budget? No, I don't have budget. No. Yes. I'm the decision maker. Go fuck yourself. Of course I am. And Oh, by the way, my timeline is, I don't know. Cause you called me, but what if you come into the conversation with a prepared mind, a hypothesis and a demonstrated understanding of what their current state might, might be like, cause you've had this conversation before and say, you know what?

My hunch is if you're kind of like this, then you might be struggling with these things because you've, cause you understand them. We talk often about that, but we don't empower the SDRs enough to be able to do that. And to go into the conversation to do that. And if you, if you do, it's going to take some investment. It's not that difficult. Then guess what? They can, you can elevate them. And now the conversion rates from SDR to AE are significantly higher and the close rates will likely be higher because you're spending more time upfront. It's not qualifying. You're just engaging them in a different way. Adding value. Right. And going back to that whole point about, you know, the experience and everything else, we're going to do a whole nother podcast, by the way, I want to learn your format of teaching kids business acumen quickly so that they don't have to learn how to read a full 10 K in your report, that type of stuff.

We're going to get back on the call and do that. But look, we're, you know, as I said earlier, we could talk for a fucking week here. Um, I, I, I, hopefully people are like, hopefully this broke a lot of brains here to get you to think a little bit differently. Um, Doug, what, let's finish up, but what, um, any, any place you want people to send right now, as far as what you're working on and, and cause I know you got a bunch of shit going on right now, you got all sorts of crap. I got, yeah, I, I, yeah, just follow me on LinkedIn. That's my primary place where I post and I got a lot of posts coming out. I'm going to throw some wrenches in the world of sales and label man. I'm going to throw some wrenches in the world of marketing.

Guess what marketers, you don't create leads. Yep. I said it here. Product led growth is going to go to market motion to the future. Yep. I said it here. Yeah. You want, this is my year of being provocative. So follow me on LinkedIn and, uh, let's, let's stir the pot a little bit here. I'm going to post that video that we have a view of enablement is not a fucking word. Well, it's funny though. So like if you're, if you're just out there and you've got an enablement professional in your organization, walk up to them and ask them to be like, Hey, tell me what the sales equation is. And if they don't tell you the answer, tell them to go do their homework. That's a whole nother topic. That's a whole nother.

Right. But I, but I love this, man. I think let's, let's start throwing as many fucking wrenches into this shit as possible. If nothing else to see if we can get some, some, some momentum around doing something about where we are. Right. Right. Because I, I, I just feel, I really feel it. And I see it. That's so many people and so many companies are going through the motions and they're doing things just to do them. They're having events just to have them because you know, they're doing webinars because we don't have in-person events anymore. We're doing, you know, uh, sales reps, we got to send out cadences because that's what everybody else is fucking doing. And we have to have the predictable revenue model because that's how Salesforce grew.

It's like, fuck that. There's a better way of thinking about it right now. And the shifts are happening. And if you're not on top of that right now, you're going to be left in the dust here in the next three to five years. No question about it. So mic drop, mic drop, mic drop. Thanks as always for coming on. Let's, uh, let's, uh, I'm going to be intentional with me getting out to LA to see you. And, and, and again, when you're here in Boston, if we don't grab a drink, man, I'm going to punch you square in the mouth. We are. All right. All right, everybody. Look, like I said, hopefully you all enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. And it got you to think a little bit differently about your career, your company, whatever the fuck it is, but just get better.

And like I always say, look, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause even if you had a terrible day, you make somebody smile, you know, you had a good day in the world needs a lot more of that. So thank you all very much for listening. I'll see you on the other side. All right, y'all. That's a wrap. As always, we encourage you to become a JB sales member and gain access to the JB sales team. Our training, our courses, tips, webinars, and replays are all available for you at on demand.jbarrows.com. Follow us on Instagram for daily sales techniques and tactics at JB sales training, all one word, and we'll catch up with you on the gram. Have a great week. Everybody get out there and serve those clients, catch up with those prospects.

Be sure that you are asking the right questions, doing the right things and serving people to the best of your ability. Get out there and make somebody smile today. It'll make your day and theirs. We'll see you next week when we bring you another stellar guest to help you sell better. Make it happen, everybody. Thank you. For more information, visit www.fema.org